Calcalist is reporting (Hebrew only) that Modu has brought in another $7M in funding courtesy of Qualcomm which as part of the agreement will also manufacture the Modu “core”.
Modu has had a whirlwind of a year, first debuting to much fanfare at last year’s Mobile World Congress, where we had a chance to sit with the company’s CEO, Dov Moran, for a 1-on-1 for a demo. The company then went on to raise a whopping $100M round. Then in November Modu announced a 33%, 88-employee downsizing in November.
Clearly things are not all rosy at Modu, but the company now has some more cash to pursue its very risky mobile play. If anyone has any further info, please post it in the comments below.
“Modu is a tiny modular phone that can be slipped into different device “jackets”— like an MP3 player, GPS, bigger cell phone, car stereo, or digital camera.”-
Phone Modules? Like turn anything into a phone? Hmmmmm
The article mentions that they didn’t succeed in getting the $100M they aspired to get but “only” $65M.
It also says that they’re / were supposed to launch their first phone in one of Israel’s cell phhone companies called cellcom…
Mo–They were trying to raise another round. There’s confusion as to the exact amount the company has raised.
Its a pre $200 iPhone 3G thing that takes forever to go to market and no one really want, need or care about, besides Israeli media. This is an example of VC’s banking on a one time entrepreneur thinking that he is superman and has the golden touch. Its very hard to make it big one time, its virtually impossible to do it twice. Modu’s money will go down the drain.
With their current burn rate, this amount will not last long.
This company could survive (and not necessarily succeed) only if they would go public which is unlikely going to happen.
I doubt they will be in business, as a stand alone company, by end of 2010. Don’t be surprised if Qualcomm will end up “acquiring” this company within the next two years and turn it into a department.
does crunchbase have the location correct… korea?
Thanks–fixed!
R.
Qualcomm did this once before in the late 90’s and it went nowhere and got sold off to Sierra Wireless. No chance they will buy them.
This thing was a good idea a couple of years ago, when cell phones were basically just cellphones.
Now, when almost every cell is also a good MP3 player, a reasonable camera and in many cases- a GPS device, there’s absolutely no logic in building this.
Who will go around carrying all those “jackets” when we have almost everything in a reasonably sized/priced/weighed device?
Or are they going to convince me to plug my phone into a microwave oven?
Goodd posting – Pradeep