Next Generation Texting Company GOGII Raises $8.2 Million in New Financing

Marina del Rey, Calif. (PRWEB) December 10, 2009

GOGII, Inc., the creator of the next generation texting application textPlus, announced today that it has raised $ 8.2 million in a round of financing led by Matrix Partners, with existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating in the round. The new funding is the second round of successful financing for the quickly growing mobile start-up, which raised a Series A round from Kleiner Perkins' iFund in December 2007.

GOGII's mobile application textPlus merges both old-style texting - one-to-one conversations - and next generation texting - rich, engaging environments and instant group text conversations. The company uses sponsorships and advertisements embedded in the textPlus app environment to make it free for users to download and use.

"Today, the number of cell phone users who use texting as their primary mode of communication is staggering; GOGII has learned how to tap this enormous market and help advertisers reach consumers on their mobile devices in a way that has never been done before," said Scott Lahman, CEO and co-founder of GOGII. "We are honored to receive this kind of validation from two of the world's most successful venture firms. The new financing will allow us to bring our rich texting environments and features to even more carriers, handsets and users."

"What impressed us most about GOGII was its ability to provide a simple, appealing environment on mobile phones where rich advertisements are sure to be seen: alongside SMS messages," said Matrix Partners General Partner Dana Stalder, who will join GOGII's board as of this round. "Customer response to the textPlus app is higher than that of any competitor in the market we have seen thanks to its unprecedented features - and advertisers eager to reach this market are catching on quickly."

Since launching the textPlus app in June 2009, GOGII has taken several major steps to bring texting to a new level. This November, textPlus debuted username "text addresses," which allow anyone in the U.S. with a mobile phone to start a text conversation with their friends using textPlus by simply texting a friend's username to 60611. textPlus with usernames also provides users worldwide the ability to send messages app-to-app anywhere in the world for free. textPlus will soon make it possible to create usernames for entire groups, or communities, of users.

textPlus has proven to be tremendously popular with consumers. To date, the textPlus app has been downloaded almost 3 million times, reaching over 9 million people, with over 300 million messages sent using the service since June. And while only the top 5% of applications in the Apple App Store reach 100,000 unique monthly visitors, textPlus exceeded that by over 7 times in its second month of release.

About GOGII (go-jee)

GOGII provides customers the next generation of text messaging through its flagship product, textPlus, a feature-rich, third-party text messaging application. The company was founded in 2008 by the three founders of JAMDAT Mobile, the leading mobile entertainment publisher that was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2006.

About Matrix Partners

Matrix Partners is a premier venture capital firm that has generated outstanding returns for over three decades. The firm has delivered several of the industry's top performing funds of all time. Matrix Partners operates in the United States, India and China. The firm has been fortunate to be a part of the creation of game-changing, industry-leading businesses such as Aruba Networks (Nasdaq: ARUN), JBoss (Red Hat), Netezza (NYSE: NZ), SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK), Starent Networks (Nasdaq: STAR), Sycamore Networks (Nasdaq: SCMR) and Veritas Software (Symantec).

About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in over 500 ventures, including AOL, Amazon.com, Citrix, Compaq Computer, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Genomic Health, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, VeriSign and Xilinx. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 250,000 people. More than 150 of the firm's portfolio companies have gone public. In 2008, the firm launched the iFund to invest in mobile applications on the iPhone platform in collaboration with Apple. The firm has offices in Menlo Park, California; Beijing, China; and Shanghai, China.

http://www.gogii.com

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Related Series B Round Press Releases

Flurry Raises $7 Million Series B to Accelerate Mobile Analytics Firm's Rapid Growth - InterWest Partners leads round of financing

San Francisco and New York (PRWEB) January 12, 2010

Flurry, Inc., a leading mobile application analytics provider, today announced it has closed a Series B financing round of $ 7 million. Led by top-tier venture capital firm InterWest Partners, the round included existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Draper Richards.

InterWest general partner, Doug Pepper, also joins the Flurry board of directors. In addition to a decade of technology investment experience focused on digital marketing and advertising, Mr. Pepper brings board level experience with relevant companies including Marketo, INVIDI Technologies, Brand.net and Offerpal Media, as well as professional experience with Amazon.com.

Since launching its service in January 2009, Flurry has quickly emerged as one of the worlds largest mobile application analytics and monetization platforms. The company now tracks over one billion end user application sessions per month across iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Over 15,000 developers have chosen to integrate Flurry Analytics within their applications, which have been downloaded to more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices.

Smartphone application download growth is skyrocketing like nothing in recent consumer tech history, dwarfing even early Internet adoption, said Flurry chief executive officer, Simon Khalaf. With its significant reach, Flurry is positioned to play a significant role in leveraging the measurement of consumer behavior to accelerate the sale of applications and virtual goods.

The financing will be used to aggressively build out new services that increase application developer revenue, hire new employees and scale its infrastructure. Flurry AppCircle, currently in private beta, is the first of a series of revenue generating services designed to use data to intelligently target consumers and increase sales in the App Store.

Flurry has built one of the industrys most widely deployed and powerful tools for measuring and monetizing mobile application usage, said Doug Pepper, general partner, InterWest Partners. "This is an exciting time of innovation and growth for the mobile industry and we're thrilled to be involved with the passionate and experienced team at Flurry.

With Apples announcement last week that more than three billion apps have been downloaded, the App Store is growing at a rate 15 times faster than the iTunes store over the same time period. Piper Jaffray senior analyst, Gene Munster forecasts that Apple will sell an additional 36 million iPhones in 2010, a 40 percent increase from 2009 estimates. Additionally, more than 50 Android handsets, including the recently launched Google Nexus One, are expected to ship in 2010. Looking forward, Frost & Sullivan forecasts that Android OS devices will hold the third largest market share of the smartphone market by 2014, among the fastest rates of growth for a mobile product in the history of the mobile industry.

To learn more about the Flurry Analytics and Flurry AppCircle, please visit http://www.flurry.com.

About Flurry

Recently merged with Pinch Media, Flurry is among the largest smartphone application analytics and monetization platforms in the world, now tracking more than 80% of all consumers across iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Each month, Flurry tracks over one billion end user sessions per month across iPhone, Android, Blackberry and J2ME devices.

Flurry Analytics, its flagship service, is designed to help developers make better applications to increase retention and grow revenue. Flurry AppCircle, now in private beta, is designed to help developers acquire the most valuable users, faster and for less money. Flurry is venture backed with offices in San Francisco and New York. For more information, please visit http://www.flurry.com.

About InterWest Partners

For 30 years InterWest (http://www.interwest.com) has partnered with exceptional entrepreneurs to build winning technology and life sciences companies. With more than 200 years of combined operating and investing experience, InterWests team has raised $ 2.8B, completed more than 70 IPOs, and participated in nearly 60 upside acquisitions. As the firm invests InterWest X, a $ 650M fund, InterWest continues to believe that providing capital is just the beginning of a long-term collaboration with entrepreneurs to turn their vision into a thriving company.

The firm's past successful investments in information technology include: CIENA (CIEN), Copper Mountain Networks (CMTN), Crystal Semiconductor (acquired by Cirrus Logic, CRUS), Cyrix (CYRX; acquired by National Semiconductor (NSM), Lightera (acquired by CIENA), PlaceWare (acquired by Microsoft, MSFT), SiTera (acquired by Vitesse, VTSS), Silicon Graphics (SGI), Stratacom (STRM; acquired by Cisco, CSCO) and Xilinx (XLNX).

Note to Editors

iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and J2ME are trademarks of their respective companies. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.

Media contact:

Peter Farago

VP Marketing

Flurry, Inc.

peter(at)flurry(dot)com

510-461-4450

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