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Invi, a mobile messaging app for Android which lets users look for and share pictures, YouTube videos and more, is today announcing $3 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Alpha Investment, UpWest Labs, and Silicon Valley angels from Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Groupon, Spotify, SRI, Cisco, Chegg and others.
The new financing comes on the heels of an earlier $750,000 round from Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and different angels revealed back in November. This $3 million round especiallies that previous raise.
‘Messaging has not been evolved much,’ describes invi co-founder Iddo Tal of his company’s motivation. Although users are now sending dozens if not hundreds of texts each day, most of those communications still occur over SMS.
Co-founder Lior Gonnen states that the concept with invi is to incorporate every app on a user’s phone into invi’s chat. When you share a piece of site – whether an Instagram picture, YouTube video, tune from Spotify, and more – the link (URL) for that material is transformed into a ‘virtual widget’ inside invi showing the rich media. Kind of like Gmail’s ‘preview’ feature, recipients can then view that content right in the invi app.
In its initial incarnation, invi was more of a private mobile messenger which provided users the capability to interact with other invi users for free over information or Wi-Fi connections in order to stay clear of SMS charges. This is a model which has proved effective for a growing variety of messaging start-ups worldwide, however still one that restricts an app’s potential user base. So today, invi is attempting to expand its user base by likewise presenting the capability to text with other, non-invi users at routine SMS rates.
However, in spite of adding this brand-new capability, users trying to share a photo or video from their Electronic camera or Android Gallery app, are still be met an ‘Invi Just’ flag in the messaging app. They can search and share YouTube videos, however other options like ‘Contact’ or ‘Music’ are listed as ‘coming soon.’
With the added financing, the strategy is to grow invi’s now six-person group with more engineering skill, especiallying those who can assist bring the app to iOS, Windows Phone, and the Chrome web browser, too. Longer-term the strategy to monetize the free app involves letting users send each other gifting that are more transactional in nature.
And no, for as soon as, a messaging start-up doesn’t prepare to make offering sticker packs its company design.
Instead, the founders explain that the business, once it’s developed a big sufficient user base, would help users send more meaningful items to their closet buddies, like possibly provides, cards, and even money.
In the near term, nevertheless, the strategy is to add support for other user requested products like group talk and landscape mode, for example.
First introduced in October 2012, invi has seen numerous hundred thousand downloads so far, with over HALF of those in the U.S. Today, the app is being localized in a lots more languages, and is available worldwide in Google Play here.