Meebo Closes Big Funding Round
Michael Arrington
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Web chat startup Meebo has closed the funding round they’ve been working on with investment bank Montgomery & Co., a source tells us. Expect an announcement shortly.
The best information we’ve been able to gather says the company raised $25 million or so on a $200 million valuation. Earlier this month they abandoned efforts to sell the company, focusing instead on raising money.
Meebo was negotiating with strategic partners to join the funding round as well, including eBay, Fox/MySpace and AOL. From what we’ve heard, none of those companies invested.
To date Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Mike, do you know how many active users they have and if they have any revenue and if so how much? As nuclear as the winter might end up being, 20M is a lot of money. It will be interesting to see if they plan to continue doing what they do or try to branch out to new directions.
meebo gets like 1mill in revenue, im neutral on meebo, its a good site/company but i dont know if they are worth 200 mill.
They sure know how to squeeze the juice.
20 is a big number for a small revenue site from my point of view. It will be nice to use it in developing a more powerful API first
Anyway, Go Meebo
so, let me translate since Michael probably doesn’t fully understand the code language here:
They tried *hard* to sell under the guise of “we’re trying to raise some money, would you like to invest?” When that failed they went to typical financial investors and raised a round because they don’t have a revenue model and they know they’ll get wiped out by the economic downturn.
Every time a Web 2.0 company gets a valuation over $100M in an investment round, it’s another nail in the coffin for Web 2.0. How much of a step-up from that valuation will the investors need to see? How many companies are going to see exits in that range, and why would someone buy them in a year who wouldn’t buy them today?
Meebo is a great service, but $200mil? I always argue that the ‘web 2.0 bubble’ isn’t really that bubble-like given the much smaller scale of investments compared to 2000. But when companies like Meebo are taking over 30M on a 200M valuation, I start to wonder. All said, I think the tool is awesome and millions of users do find it useful - they just need to figure out how to monetize it. Rumors are that they have started to do just that.
My guess would be that investors have been shown a native iPhone Meebo app behind the scenes
bubble burst
What exactly is Meebo good for again? It’s already getting blocked by schools and corporate networks which were the whole reason it took off in the first place and it’s built on other IM clients which will eventually screw it over. That’s like building a business on top of a glacier in the middle of El Nino.
However the cookie crumbles, congrats to Meebo.
this is retarded and sad….
Strategic investments from TWX TimeWarner, KTB( Korean) , Jafco Ventures (Japan) , Sequoia and DFJ . Net traffic, movies, music, Asian market expansion, a solid team of fantastic engineers. I guess investors probably are not much concerned about Meebo revenues at this point in time. Risky bets bring greater rewards. Their site is very useful and super easy to use. My kids and their friends love it.
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