Many a startup has died waiting for telecom carriers to share revenue with them. Mobio is hoping for that same sort of generosity on the part of the carriers and has convinced a pair of venture capital firms that it will succeed. The mobile startup said this week it has closed a $9 million first round of funding from Storm Ventures and InterWest Partners. Storm incubated the startup last year.
Mobio has developed technology that makes surfing the mobile Internet palatable. Its target market is large. While the top ten web sites will make their sites work on mobile phones themselves, the others are looking for help, explained CEO Ramneek Bhasin. That's were Mobio comes in. I saw a demonstration of the service booking a dinner reservaction via OpenTable and it worked well. Fortunately, Mobio isn't completely dependent on the carriers. When the service launches to the public next month, it will garner transaction revenue from its content partners.
Still, if it can strike a good deal with carriers, Mobio has huge upside. To do that, it must convince them that its user interface can compel users to employ their mobile phones to buy things and search for information much more frequently than they do now.
For more on Mobio, see:
CrunchGear
VentureBeat
Tags: mobio, vc, venture+capital, demo2007, demo07, demo, mobile
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