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), AOL (TWX.N), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Google (GOOG.O) 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.
Thirty percent of users are in the United States and 70 percent are international. Brazil and India are No. 2 and No. 3 in terms of users, while China and Britain are in close competition for the fourth-largest number of users.
Twenty-five percent of meebo users are teenagers, 20 percent are college-age and another 25 percent are recent college graduates who use meebo to stay connected with friends while at work, he said.
The one million registered users understates the service's popularity. Meebo can be signed onto using any of the major IM services password credentials, meaning far more sign on to the service than sign up to become meebo members.
Meebo has caught on among users as a complement to social networking services like MySpace and Facebook. A version of meebo called "meebo me" can be embedded onto the profile pages of News Corp.'s MySpace, Facebook or Microsoft Spaces.
In this way meebo users are able to track when friends are signed on to any of the popular blog sites including Microsoft Spaces, netvibes, WordPress and SixApart or social networks Amie Street, Traineo, ChickAdvisor and Schmedley.
In February, meebo plans to open up the underlying software to allow other companies to embed meebo in their own Web sites. Sternberg said the company was working with at least two major partners but declined to identify the companies.
More details can be found at www.meebo.com.
