Last week, we announced a new $2 million Series B financing round that we raised from Accel Partners & Cisco. This milestone in our young company’s history is an opportune moment to reflect on MobStac’s growth trajectory over the years and share my vision of the mobile future that we’re working to make a reality.
When we first started out building the MobStac platform over 3 years ago, we knew that the rapid consumer adoption of mobile was leading to extraordinary growth in content consumption. We believed in a future in which mobile would become the primary Internet device and news among other content would see significant adoption from mobile consumers. MobStac today has partnered with premier media companies in India such as The Hindu, Times Internet, and with digital publishers such as allAfrica and IntoMobile, and helped them build comprehensive mobile-first experiences for their audiences. Our customers have seen their mobile traffic grow over 5-10x over the last 18 months, leading to a healthy increase in digital revenue.
Our platform today delivers mobile content to over 5 million consumers spread across 40 different countries. Along the way, we have partnered with companies like Google to help their AdSense publishers leverage mobile as a fast-growing monetization channel through the use of MobStac technology. To achieve this significant scale, we have invested heavily in our platform and built patent-pending technology that continues to fuel our growth. Our scalable cloud platform has been responsible for keeping up with the growing needs of our customers and has been covered in a case study by Amazon Web Services showcasing the efficacy of our software architecture.
From where we stand, it is clear that mobile intent is now expanding from simple content consumption (i.e. reading news & sports) to buying products and services as the mobile consumer becomes more and more mature. Research suggests that 62% of consumers use the mobile to compare prices in store before they make a purchasing decision.
The growing mobile commerce trend, in our view, is the next bastion of the mobile consumption story, and a perfect fit for the platform we have built at MobStac. We’re using the new capital we have raised to expand our platform capabilities to cater to the mobile commerce needs of consumer brands. Our mobile commerce engine combines adaptive content delivery with next-generation mobile commerce features such as discovery-led social shopping and personalized catalogs.
As the consumerization of mobile continues, content and commerce will be the leading intents on mobile for brands and enterprises to engage their consumers. We believe the future of mobile consumption is going to be driven by personalization and our platform, which leverages social signals to create differentiated experiences on mobile, will drive significant new mobile revenue for both content and commerce consumer brands.
We’re also using the new capital to increase our geographical reach. I’m excited to announce the opening of our new office in New York to better service the growing list of customers we now have in North America. As a part of these efforts, I am personally relocating to New York in February to kick-start operations.
I am personally very psyched about everything we’re doing here at MobStac and look forward to an exciting 2014!
Best,
Sharat Potharaju,
Co-founder and CEO