The company has announced just $5 million in funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, but they may have burned through substantially more than that. There was rumored to be a previous angel round of nearly $2 million, and the founders took $3 million or so off the table in 2008. Sutter Hill may also have bridged the company an additional $2 million Along with the venture debt, the company may have raised as much as $14 million in capital. At this point, all equity holders other than the cashed-out founders are wiped out.

The startup provided text messaging based marketing services on behalf of brands, similar to competitor Mozes. We’ve added it to the deadpool.

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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.

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Mobile community builder Mozes has been releasing some new functionality over the past couple of weeks that enables users to access their Mozes activity across the web and participate in voice-based campaigns.

Mozes is a company we covered over a year ago (and BusinessWeek wrote up recently) that focuses on connecting musicians with their fans using text-based mobile campaigns. Much of this consists of running contests at concerts. If you saw Maroon 5 perform live recently, you may have participated in a contest to win a prize pack by texting a Mozes number with your cell phone and joining the band’s “mobile group” (basically a cell phone-based fan club). Similarly, the band Plain White T’s have run contests at their concerts for giving out backstage passes. Once users are drawn into bands’ mobile groups, they will continue to receive messages and special content from their favorite artists via text messaging, even after the show has ended. So far, Mozes works with over 1,000 artists including Fall Out Boy, Avril Lavigne, Nelly, and R. Kelly to create these mobile fan groups.

For awhile now, users have been able to log into their account on Mozes’s website to access all of the activity going on in their mobile groups (and read messages that the artists themselves have texted to the groups, download exclusive content like MP3s, etc.). Mozes is extending its reach by syndicating mobile group activity across the web in two main ways: by pushing the data out to social networks with a Facebook application and a MySpace widget, and by providing RSS feeds. The Facebook application (Text Me) and MySpace widget work similarly: both display notifications generated by the Mozes groups to which you belong (see screenshot to the left). The company also says it will be looking forward to participating in Google’s OpenSocial initiative.

Mozes has also added the ability for fans and musicians to exchange voice messages with one another. Artists can reach out to their fan base by sending them short audio clips, and fans can return the favor by sending voice recordings back (although I wonder how many artists will have the interest or time to sort through voicemail messages left for them by fans). Voice messages can also be syndicated; check out the widget on Nelly’s MySpace page that plays messages from a US map.

While Mozes focuses on musicians, their network can be extended to other uses. For example, we partnered with Mozes in September to enable TechCrunch40 conference attendees to vote on their favorite companies via SMS.

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Users send a keyword by text message to 66937 (Mozes) and receive whatever message the owner of that keyword has determined.  In addition to news updates on any topic, keyword owners can send ringtones and perform polls.  Registering your first keyword is free and additional keywords cost $5 per month.   The dominant use cases right now are bands enabling their fans to request updates but the possibilities are endless.  Gabe Rivera, I found out after trying it, scored the keyword “gossip” and sends the newest headline from his gossip memetracker WeSmirch when users text “gossip” to Mozes.  When users go to the Mozes website and enter their phone numbers, they are shown all their most recent received messages, complete with links from the senders.

The service enables a number of other activities by SMS as well.  Users can text any question they have to Mozes and their friends list will be given an opportunity to answer that questions by Google Talk IM.  Users can send notes to themselves by entering “.n” before any note they want to store in their Mozes account online. (.n nice hair, singer guy.)  Links to MySpace and Facebook user profiles can be saved by sending the social network’s name followed by the username.  Amazon affiliate links to books can be saved in you Mozes account by texting “book” and the ISBN number.  That way the next time you are at a bar and someone recommends a book to you, you can save the book by ISBN and remember who sent it via their Facebook profile link!  

Ok, so that may not be realistic but the moral of the story is that Mozes gives ample opportunities for users to send a whole lot of text messages.  The standard business model for SMS services is to receive a share of the SMS fee for each message sent to the service from the carriers.

This call-and-response model sounds less annoying though also less sticky than the model used by TextMarks, another SMS company profiled here this week.  I think it’s a very smart approach. The only issue it raises in my mind is that messages are driven by keywords and prime (short, memorable) keywords are inevitably in short supply. The name “Mozes” is far enough from the number 411, 0 or whatever other catchy point of access  previous generations used that adding long keywords could make the service too onerous for ongoing use.  If usable keywords prove to be a finite resource, that could be a problem.

The feature set, approach to markets and direct path to monetization make Mozes look like a money printing machine, albeit one that prints money in very small increments.

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It allows you to do all sorts of things via sms. Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information). Meet someone who has a Mozes keyword? SMS their Mozes keyword to 66937 and store whatever personal information they’ve elected to share. And online advertisers can use a Mozes keyword to give you more information on the product.

Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch wrote a long review of Mozes with more information. Mozes faces a formidable chicken/egg problem – a lot of the value is realized only when a lot of people are using it. But it may be worth grabbing your personal keyword at Mozes now, just in case this is the next big thing. And you can use the radio station functionality right away.

Mozes has stayed quiet but they will finally start making some noise this weekend and generate revenue at the Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo. The Faire is being put on by O’Reilly Media for its Make Magazine – a magazine for DIY technology projects. The event is going to be huge (15,000 people are expected) and as people walk around the Faire, they will be able to save information about their favorite exhibitors using Mozes. Dorrian sees it as a micro testing ground for how they will deploy Mozes in the real world.

To get started, sms “Dorrian” to 66937. You’ll add the founder to your friends list, and get an activation code.