Funding Updates : NetXcell To Raise $3 million Through Private Equity
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After being termed as “One of the most innovative companies in India in 2007“, by Microsoft, the Hyderabad based NetXcell has announced that it will be raising around $ 3 million through private equity. The fund will be used to expand its sales in India and the US, besides its product portfolio, reports BusinessStandard.
The company makes Value Added Service (VAS) products for mobile phones.
NetXcell had earlier raised $1 million in its first round of funding from Ike Lee, a venture partner of Ignition Partners, and Ruderman Capital last year. It had then signed a MoU with Lifestyle Wireless, US.
Dayakar Puskoor, Executive Chairman of the company said,
“Our current investors have given their consent for extended funding and we expect to close the transaction during this year”
NetXcell is currently 72-people strong and offers Value-Added-Service like short message service centre (carrier grade messaging platform) and gateways (SMS, unstructured supplementary service data, and WAP), besides interactive voice response (IVR) and voice outbound dialing to telecom operators.
NetXCell is eight year old and has revenues of Rs.5 crore (2007-2008). For the year 2008, the projected revenue is Rs.18 crores. It has Airtel, Aircel and Idea as its major customers.
Puskoor said two more products are in the pipeline, which will be launched next year. He further told about Ad Axis, an ad platform for mobile phones, which enables delivery of contextual advertisements on mobile phones. Speaking about the product, Puskoor said,
“This product will take NetXcell to a new arena - mobile advertisements - which is currently a few million dollar market but is bound to grow to $70 billion by 2012. At present, we are in talks with a customer to do a pilot and plan to introduce the product in India and the US this October”
There are some other players working on the mobile platform advertising as well. See mKhoj and Mobile Worx. Eight years is a long time, and Airtel, Idea are important customers. Let’s see if NetXcell is at the right place at the right time. Watch this space.
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