IfByPhone Gets $4.6 Million in Funding, Proves You Can Raise Money if You Know How To Make Money
by
on November 17, 2008,
Of course it is less frequently that we report funding news these days but that only makes funding announcements that still happen more newsworthy to us. Today’s announcement is Ifbyphone’s new round of $4.6 million in venture funding.
The funding comes from five VC firms: Apex Venture Partners and Origin Ventures that led this round after investing in Ifbyphone’s first round of institutional funding along with Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A and Blue Crest Capital Finance.
Ifbyphone serves as a platform for a number of hosted telephony applications for businesses: from simple click-to-call links to sophisticated lead-generation solutions. The number of telephony applications that Ifbyphone offers to business customers is definitely impressive and ensure that even a small company can enjoy the same level of sophisticated telephony solutions that is usually only accessible to large corporations - yet at a more affordable price.
Ifbyphone also has something to offer to end users. For example, we spoke about Ifbyphone launching a Facebook application back in May. This application is intended to receive free calls from the friends on the social network right to your phone. At the time we described the Phone-me-now application as something actually useful amidst multiple applications that do nothing but annoy your friends with constant invitations.
There are also various applications produced by Ifbyphone for other platforms - like a voice broadcast and conference call applications for iPhone, and Joomla smart click-to-call module. The company also promises to launch a Blackberry voice broadcast application and plugins for Microsoft Outlook and SalesForce.
I think every time that we now read about funding announcements, everyone asks the question of how this or that startup actually makes money even more frequently than we used to do. And with Ifbyphone the answer is simple as they target businesses customers so they will have more or less stable revenue source even in the generally unfavorable economic environment. And even when they deal with the end users, they also charge them for extra minutes in addition to a basic package that they offer for free. So it is quite understandable that a company that knows how to make money will be able to raise money to ensure continuous development to build a comprehensive set of services to offer to its customers.
Another interesting thing to note is that IfByPhone is based in Chicago so this amount of $4.6 million of funding will do more for this company than in could do for a Silicon Valley based startup - in fact, experts evaluate this amount as equal to $6.5-$7 million raised in the Valley due to a considerable difference between rent, salaries and other costs that are often higher in California. I wonder if that means we will see startups moving to cheaper areas in the United States now that they have to further cut the costs involved in running their businesses with Silicon Valley remaining the place for only the most extravagant startups that rely on parties and meetups heavily for PR - and have sufficient funding to survive the recession and keep throwing parties.
