Palo Alto-based mobile startup Mozes has secured an additional $11.5 million in Series B funding from lead investor Maveron, as well as existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
Mozes powers online communities for musicians that fans can join by texting special keywords to designated phone numbers. Once fans have opted into, say, the Death Cab for Cutie “mob”, they can keep track of that band through the Mozes website, their social network profiles, and messages sent right to their phones. Fans can also respond to their favorite artists by sending them text messages and other media like photos and voicemail.
This is just a sample of the services Mozes has built around SMS. The company also provides text-based voting systems, which we used at the TechCrunch40 conference last year to collect responses from attendees.
This Series B round brings the company’s total to $16.5 million, with a Series A of $5 million having been raised in February 2007.
Update: We spoke to Mozes CEO Dorrian Porter and got some more details. Jonathan Fram from Maveron will be joining the board (he also sits on the board of Video Egg). Since launch last year, 1.5 million fans have participated on Mozes, with about 45 percent opting to receive ongoing messages in subscription form. There are 4,000 bands that market through Mozes, and anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000 messages a day are sent through the service.
Most significantly, Porter will try to move Mozes beyond just bands. He wants to position Mozes away from being seen as simply a music social network. Instead, he wants to it also to be known as a mobile marketing platform for sports teams, retailers, lifestyle brands, and even conferences. To that end, he will be launching a newly designed Website in early June that appeals as much to marketers as it does to music fans. (We are waiting to see how he does that). But the polling and messaging features of his service could certainly be applied to other forms if mobile marketing.
The thing is, Porter needs to hire someone to lead Web development for Mozes. He is so desperate that he is offering his employees major incentives for any referral that leads to a successful hire. And he is extending the offer to TechCrunch readers. So if you know someone who can lead a Web development team, refer them to Mozes, and Porter hires that person, you will get:
$10,000 cash
$500 Starbucks Gift Card
Two airline tickets to Hawaii
Sony Bravia 60-inch 1080p Rear Projection HDTV
Candidates can even refer themselves. Send the referral by email to tcweb [at] mozes-inc [dot] com. The only caveat is that the person must stay for at least 90 days.
Extravagant? Maybe. But with $11.5 million in his bank account, he can afford it.
Ok. How do they make money?
@1 I think they can make money by using ads in text messages. Am I right?
Who picks up the SMS bill from the cell phone companies?
Congrats to Mozes! Their service rocks!!
Yawn – they are a mobile marketing company, so one would assume they get paid for running… you guessed it… marketing campaigns. Yawn at a lot of companies, but it seems like Mozes is really doing some innovative stuff in the mobile marketing arena. At least the value prop for both consumers and marketers seems to be there…
I am looking forward to my new life in the SMS world.
Peter
follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban
They don’t have enough users to generate real revenue through SMS advertising alone. I’m sure they charge the labels flat fees.
Congrats to Mozes for successfully building a trusted and reliable brand in a space crowded with many other providers of unknown and questionable intent.
Mozes can suck it. They are not a good product. They were something cool in 2006, but now it is just spam on your phone. SMS SPAM!
Congrats to Dorrian and the Mozes team. They’re good people!
I have used their service before. They are ad-free, except that they put their brand at the end of some of your messages. So they have to be charging the labels to run their campaigns.
that’s an insane incentive, venetually SV/SF sucks for finding top ppl, hope the election will unlock visas-for-talents cause actually the man Porter seeks is probably…. not on the US territory ATM
They make their money by sharing message revenues with the carriers.
@ Simon
Recruiters make 1/3 of salary so $15k is a discount
I think its funny that they raised 11 Million dollars to enter the SMS Marketing business. There are so many well established players and its extremely hard to differentiate an offering. SMS is also becoming a commodity due to all of the new self-service platforms out on the market today so margins are not as big as they used to be.
Come on guys, we had stuff like this in Europe in 2000 which are now major businesses. Mozes is ancient in so many ways. It’s totally surprising that US VCs fund stuff like this. Take a look beoynd Silicon Valley every now and then, in mobile Europe and especially Asia are way ahead.
@15, could you provide any examples of similar businesses in europe?
thanks