When Zannel Inc. raised its Series A round of $6 million in October 2006 from US Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures, it was a little coy about its mission, with co-founder and CEO Adam Zbar announcing in a press release only that the company had some good people toiling away on its products.
"We've been fortunate to assemble a team of top industry veterans while flying under the radar," Zbar was quoted saying. "We are building groundbreaking technology, which we plan to launch in the near future."
The industry veteran reference was a bit of an understatement, and it was pretty clear from the background of Zbar and his compatriots that the company was doing something fairly ambitious in the way of mobile services. Zbar, a onetime McKinsey & Co. consultant, had recently served as a mobile media strategist to InfoSpace Mobile, Disney MVNO, and Moviso, and co-founder and chief technical officer Braxton Woodham had been CTO at Infospace Mobile, where he built the company's first mobile storefronts and portals.
Zannel came out of stealth mode in March 2007 with the launch of a large-scale, video-centric, viral mobile entertainment network geared toward easy-to-use multimedia content, and it announced early partnerships with 1,500 content providers including video game publisher Konami Corp., space flight promoter X Prize Foundation and entertainment giant Warner Bros. Over the ensuing year, the company announced a slew of additional big-name partnerships and large numbers of users on multiple platforms, and in March it announced an open applications programming interface to allow developers of all kinds of emerging Web services to take advantage of its Instant Media Messaging technology.
Now on the heels of winning a 2008 Webby Award for Best Mobile Social Network, Zannel has announced it has raised $10 million in a Series B venture round led by Alloy Ventures. In announcing the deal, Alloy partner Davic Ezequelle said the firm looked at mobile sector deals for more than two years and determined that Zannel had the strongest team and business model in the area.
Zbar said the additional investment will allow the company to accelerate expansion of its proprietary and trademarked Instant Media Messaging platform for distributing mobile multimedia content to the mass market in the U.S. and abroad. The company says it will take advantage of the features of next-generation phones featuring imaging and messaging capabilities with high-speed Internet access. - Clifford Carlsen
See June 2 press release from Zannel
See March 3 press release from Zannel
See March 2007 press release from Zannel
See October 2006 press release from Zannel
For more, see Mashable.com, Entrepreneur.com and Pulse 2.0
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