Mobivox scores VC funding, cheap mobile LD being expanded

Mobivox is breathing new life to the old adage "talk is cheap", thanks in part to an $11-million investment from several venture capital firms.The Montreal start-up announced last week that it had received venture capital financing from investment firms in Canada, the US, Vietnam and China. The funds, says Mobivox CEO Stephane Marceau, will enable the discount mobile long-distance service provider to expand its services into new markets. Since the announcement, Mobivox has already expanded to an additional nine countries and 31 cities. The company's service is now available in 40 countries- from Bulgaria and China to Canada and the US.Launched in beta-form last May, the VoIP service is already used by more than 100,000 customers. The additional funds will be used, in part, for targeted regional and demographic-based marketing campaigns in an effort to spur even greater growth.To date, viral marketing and word-of-mouth have been Mobivox's primary promotional tools, and it's easy to see why. Mobivox offers cheap and free international long distance to mobile phone users. The service, which provides users with a local access number and employs speech recognition technology, can be used on both mobile and land phones. Users dial a local access number and with the help of Mobivox's VoxGirl, the personification of the speech recognition technology, are connected to the desired party. Long-distance calls to Mobivox and Skype users are not billed, but users have to pay applicable carriers airtime charges. Other long distance calls are billed as low as 1.9 cents per minute.While low-rates may generate much of the hype surrounding the company, its other services are equally compelling. Users can already place conference calls with up to ten people and seamlessly transfer calls from mobile to land devices and vice-versa. But the additional funds, Marceau tells Report on Wireless, will help the company develop and launch a greater range of services on their platform.Although the CEO was short on details, citing corporate competitiveness and confidentiality, he hinted at the array of tools Mobivox is working on."We want to increase the number of things that you can do on your phone, using your voice," he says. "We're also going to launch, over time, a series of services that may give you access to your stock quotes or audio material from your phone, as well as things that enable you to communicate with your friends and family, such as voice SMS." Some of the services will be web-based and some will involve partnerships with other organizations, Marceau adds.Strengthening partnerships and creating new ones seems to be a key theme in this investment round. Previous investors Brightspark Venture and Skypoint Capital Corp. eturned to the fold and Mobivox welcomed IDG Ventures Boston, IDG Venture Investment China and IDG Ventures Vietnam to its list of investors. Marceau hopes to capitalize on these firms' global presence and expand the company's reach into places like China.David Arnoff, general partner of IDG Ventures Boston and Mobivox's newest board member, believes current long-distance market conditions are ripe for a company like Mobivox." a rare combination of the right kind of experience. On the business side, you've got Stephen Marceau who came from Bell Mobility. And on the technical side, you've got the founder and a number of key technical experts in voice recognition technology.""When you look at what they're trying to accomplish - which is cheap and free international long distance for mobile phone users - and you look at the context of their competitors, who will have a hard time reacting to an upstart like Mobivox," Arnoff explains, "We think will be pretty competitive."

Mobivox scores VC funding, cheap mobile LD being expanded

News | 10/18/2007 1:13 pm EDT

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