Skyfire Labs Inc., makers of the “game-changing” Skyfire mobile browser, announced today that they have raised $13 million in Series B funding. This round of funding is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and includes previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures.
This brings the total funding up to $17.8 million, following a $4.8 million Series A round in June of last year. As part of the deal, Jake Seid, Lightspeed’s Managing Director, will be joining Skyfire’s Board of Directors.
Skyfire is a mobile browser which offsets a good amount of the page rendering workload to a server, freeing up the handset’s CPU and RAM to crunch things most mobile browsers leave out — namely, Flash and AJAX. Check out the demo video here.
This additional funding places further pressure on Skyfire’s main browsing rival, Opera Mobile. While Skyfire is (tentatively) free, Opera Mobile goes for 24 bucks. With Opera Mobile 9.5 facing delays, a free alternative with rich media support is beginning to look mighty tempting.
Where is IE, FF… ?
I have the Skyfire beta on a q9m and let me say that the browser works really, really well. Saying that it works better than Pocket IE is like saying that a 747 is faster than a horse and buggy. But the downside is that sites that have embraced a mobile version (Google Reader, Facebook, Gmail, Weather.com, etc…) show the desktop-enabled version, which is usually much more cumbersome to navigate on the small screen (though the representation is usually identical, something PIE can’t come close to).
Mozilla and FireFox are strangely absent on this front. Minimo never worked on smartphones properly, and Mozilla has only issued a press release about developing a smartphone version.
@Bordero Mozilla is working on a mobile version of firefox.
if this is windows only then they are going to run into a problem when MS realises PIE is crap and they update it and make it better.
a lot of mobiles makers are creating browsers based of webkit which makes for a decent browsing experience. I guess the exit they are look for is to flip to MS.
@Darren Stuart,
I bet flipping to MS is precisely their strategy (and a good one at that). Microsoft realizes they are trailing Apple in the mobile scene when it comes to software (not users, obviously). Look at their Danger acquisition. Microsoft knows they need a product fast.
I thought this browser needs Windows Mobile 5 or 6….so forget about it.
They should definitely become a MS target. I have a htc win mobile phone and it sucks. Have to re-start almost every day to be able to take calls and that is without any 3rd party software on it. You’d think that MS is learning from their past – but apparently not.
Maybe this browser will turn me into an online surfer… although I still have a hard time seeing the appeal to it. If I want to surf I whip out my notebook and save myself from the scrolling and zooming show. The mobile web market seems a little like it’s more wishful industry thinking rather then real consumer demand. It’s been in the making for quite some time (remember WAP) without really crossing the chasm (at least in the western world).
@Ted, yes, so?
It’s pretty much been the only Windows sold on PDA and smartphone devices since 2005.
Also, it will work on WM5/WM6 touchscreen or smartphone edition (Standard or Professional terminology in WM6/6.1).
Using proxy servers add scalability and personal security issues to the mobrowser problem. This is only a short-sighted solution.
I just met one of the software engineers of Skyfire yesterday over a friend’s birthday dinner. He was hinting at an announcement of this magnitude for today. It’s great that TechCrunch has captured this. Keep up the great work guys (Skyfire & TechCrunch)!
I think Opera Mini (which is free) is much more similiar in features to SkyFire than Opera Mobile. I used Opera Mobile at first and hated it before switching to Opera Mini and SkyFire. I’ve found Opera Mini is faster, but has a lot fewer features than SkyFire.
It just depends on what website I want to browse, but if SkyFire can speed up their zooming process I would switch entirely to SkyFire.
Skyfire literally murders Opera Mobile, and annihlates everything else I’ve seen for windows mobile phones except http://wake3.com/...
here is a video of me watching a video with skyfire:
http://www.vimeo.com/1051743
Finally, cant wait to get my hands on it…Mobile IE sucks, opera mini is alright but its $25…lets see how skyfire is, weird name though.
Also, another great part of Skyfire:
NO JVM REQUIRED! Verizon Wireless loves to remove or never install a java engine on their WinMo phones. Thus, to use Opera Mini, you must install a hacked up or IBM JVM intended for another device. Strange things happen – shit beeps randomly, menus are inaccessable, etc.
Skyfire is native. The look and feel is a little different from most WinMo applications (backspace doesn’t clear a softmenu you’ve inadvertently pressed, so you have to select an option to get rid of it), but close enough.
Mobile specific browsers are so old news when everything is converging into one format as cell phones are starting to ’see’ standard web pages correctly. 13 big ones down the tubes.
Opera Mini is free.
First of all the facebook comparison test they did in their demo video on their website is misleading (it suggested the iPhone Safari browser was not able to show the same webpage)… if you pointed the iPhone to the regular facebook site like Skyfire’s browser did, it works exactly the same, no difference!
Secondly, unless they get bought by Microsoft and used as the standard browser on the mobile PC, they will not survive the battle between mobile firefox (Minimo ) and Safari and Microsoft’s mobile browser (the redmond boys are guaranteed to release a better browser as well)…..
These guys are burning away $17M with a very iffy future…
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