Dublin-headquartered mobile software company NewBay has received €6.5m in Series B funding led by London-based venture capital firm Fidelity Ventures, which will help its plans for international expansion.
NewBay’s LifeCache products offer services based around mobile blogging, social networking and user-generated content (UGC) and its customer base includes O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile in the US.
The firm’s technology has also been used by popular social networking website Bebo to facilitate the ability of its users to access and upload to the site from their handset, along with receiving text alerts when a message is posted on their homepage.
“The mobile communities and UGC market, estimated to be worth US$13bn by 2011, continues to experience strong pull from operators and equipment manufacturers, as social networking and UGC are viewed as the next killer data app for the approximately 3 billion mobile devices in use across the globe,” said Simon Clark, who serves on the boards of seven software companies including Neverfail and Curam.
“NewBay has done an excellent job of building an impressive roster of clients, such as T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica O2, with proven products that are generating meaningful new revenues for these operators,” he added.
While NewBay’s LifeCache products currently serve over 250 million mobile subscribers worldwide, the company has plans for further global expansion as well as exploring acquisition opportunities and investing capital in research and development.
“This funding round led by Fidelity Ventures is testament to NewBay’s success, giving us additional resources and momentum to accelerate our expansion.
“2007 was a transformation for NewBay where we experienced triple-digit growth and increased profitability,” said Paddy Holahan, CEO of NewBay.
By Marie Boran
