INTERVIEW-Indian mobile Net firm attracts Sonera
By Y.P.Rajesh
BANGALORE, India, Jan 19 (Reuters) - The venture capital arm of Finnish telecom operator Sonera Corp (NasdaqNM:SNRA) has made a ''significant investment'' in Indian mobile Internet firm Gray Cell Applied Technologies Pvt Ltd, Gray Cell's chief executive said on Wednesday.
Gray Cell, which was founded in 1996, launched ''Unimobile'' last August, a software product that delivers text content from the Internet and e-mail to mobile phones as well as allows text transfer from one mobile phone to another through the Web.
''We have second-round funding coming from Sonera Telecom...We cannot talk about how much money they are investing but it is a significant percentage of our second round of funding,'' Vas Bhandarkar told Reuters in an interview.
Bhandarkar said Gray Cell also had investment commitments from Gilbert Global Equity Partners and Net Angels Fund, an investment fund in which he is involved.
''The total investment in the company after the second round will be about $6 million,'' Bhandarkar said in the southern Indian city where Gray Cell has its headquarters.
''The ownership of the company will be about 50 percent with the investors in the two rounds and the rest with the company's founder and employees.''
In June 1999, in its first round of fund-raising, Gray Cell received a total of $1.7 million from venture capital firms Walden and Draper and K.B. Chandrasekhar, co-founder of Exodus Communications (NasdaqNM:EXDS), a leader in data hosting.
Bhandarkar said that within the short span of time since it was launched, Unimobile had acquired ''tens of thousands'' of users in over 90 countries across the world.
He refused to give details of the exact number of consumers but said they were supported by over 250 mobile telecom operators.
"We have consumers in the UK, a larger following in Australia, in South Africa, Singapore and of course the U.S. and India, Bhandarkar said.
He said analysts estimated the number of mobile Internet users to currently be about 30 percent of 300 million mobile phone owners in the world--a number which is expected to touch a billion in a few years.
ACCESS TO SONERA'S BASE
Sonera, which has 2.3 million mobile phone users in Finland--more than twice that of India--would help Gray Cell understand Sonera's experience with its advanced Short Message Services (SMS) on mobile phones, Bhandarkar said.
''They have working relationships with other telecom operators in Europe which we hope to leverage. And the third clear advantage is to work with their mobile portal company called Sonera Zed,'' he said.
Bhandarkar said Unimobile's growth so far had been without any marketing effort but he now intended to build a marketing team and also establish partnerships with Internet portals, e-commerce companies, telecom manufacturers and telecom operators.
''We already have partnerships with Motorola Inc (NYSE:MOT), British Telecom (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: BT.L), Hutchison Whampoa Ltd and SingTel , to name a few,'' he said.
SHARE OFFER IN 2001
Gray Cell, Bhandarkar said, would continue to raise funds as it needed substantial investments in the future and would look to make an initial public offering of shares in 2001, to trade on the Nasdaq market.
''It would probably be next year, obviously a U.S. IPO to list on the Nasdaq,'' he said.
''There is a certain cost associated with acquiring consumers and this product has a lot of vital appeal. What we want to do is leverage the appeal and build an online and offline marketing campaigns,'' he said. |
