Instant message unifier meebo.com receives funding

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Meebo Inc., which allows users to view instant messages from four of the most popular services simultaneously, has won new financial backing from two of Silicon Valley's top backers of hot Internet start-ups.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) -- which funded Hotmail and Skype -- and Sequoia Capital -- early backers of Yahoo, Google and YouTube -- have agreed to invest $9 million in a second financing round for Mountain View, California-based meebo.

Meebo has seen the number of registered users double to one million in the past three months. The site, which three recent college graduates set up a year-and-a-half ago, now employs 12 people.

The service combines instant message (IM) contacts from Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), AOL (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) into a unified "buddy list." Meebo works over the Web instead of requiring users to download several different software programs on each computer where they use IM services.

Its popularity has surged among young people, many of whom have use meebo as a convenient way to overcome technical limitations on IM usage on school and office networks. Because it is Web-based, corporate network administrators see fewer security issues than traditional instant messaging programs.

"This is the same kind of thing we saw in Hotmail. and the same thing we saw in Skype," Tim Draper, DFJ founder and managing director, said of meebo's growth potential.

DFJ invested $6.5 million and Sequoia $2.5 million in the latest round, adding to Sequoia's original $3.5 million round -- bringing meebo's total funding to $12.5 million. Draper is joining the company's board of directors with the investment.

The actual number of users of meebo is around 3.5 million, who exchange around 75 million messages a day, Chief Executive Seth Sternberg said.