Rapid Mobile Media, providers of mobile advertising and mobile application provisioning software platforms, announced on 6th March the completion of a second investment round of £2 million led by US venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), who were joined by Alliance Trust Equity Partners (ATEP) as new investors in the company.
Existing investors Pentech Ventures and Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Venture Fund also participated in the round. South African venture capital firm Mion Holdings, reported as having invested in Rapid Mobile in April 2006 (see YCF 88), in the event failed to complete the deal, but remains a partner with a particular interest in the company’s betting application.
Rapid Mobile Media was founded in 2004 with the objective of creating highly interactive, transactional mobile applications that would work on any phone. This vision was realised by founder and CTO Richard M Marshall with two technologies: ThinkPhone and Active Provisioning. Together these enable the design, creation and automatic deployment of Java applications to any suitable device without the need for porting.
Manual porting of source code is often required in order to reuse software in different applications with different target hardware. The process is not cost effective, and maintaining multiple versions of the same software also causes problems.
Rapid Mobile’s initial technology was used to build Betfair Mobile, providing real-time access to the world’s largest betting exchange. In its first year of operation alone this product processed £50 million of bets and has now been deployed to over 4,000 different handset types.
Since then Rapid has built on the fundamental device-independent technology to provide support for rich, animated user interfaces suitable for gaming applications, automatic content optimisation for mobile internet delivery, and a complete cross-channel mobile advertising platform known as Ad360. Ad360 delivers adverts into applications, mobile internet, MMS and SMS, providing a complete solution for publishers and advertisers.
“Rapid Mobile offers a unique approach to solving the device diversity issues that many organisations face when delivering mobile advertising and services”, said Mike Ramsay, Venture Partner at NEA who also joins the Rapid Mobile Media board as investor director. “By enabling the rapid deployment and monetisation of services, we believe Rapid Mobile is ideally positioned to achieve significant success in the rapidly growing mobile advertising market, providing for the delivery of high quality display advertisements both within applications and mobile internet sessions.”
California-based New Enterprise Associates (NEA – www.nea.com) was founded in 1978, and focuses on investments at all stages of a company’s development, from seed stage through IPO. With approximately $8.5 billion in committed capital, NEA has invested in more than 550 companies, of which over 160 have gone public and more than 230 have been acquired. In Scotland, NEA has previously invested in games developer Realtime Worlds (see YCF 96, December 2006).
Rapid Mobile’s connection with NEA was made through Mike Ramsay, who joined Pentech’s Advisory Group in November 2006. Ramsay started his career with Hewlett Packard in South Queensferry before moving to the USA with Silicon Graphics. He then founded TiVo, the company that defined the digital video recorder market, and grew it to a Nasdaq listing.
Rapid Mobile had made approaches to Albany Ventures before it became part of the Alliance Trust group. Richard Hope, investment director at ATEP, also joins the Rapid Mobile Media board as investor director.
“We are delighted to welcome both NEA and ATEP as new investors to the company,” commented Jeremy Copp, CEO of Rapid Mobile Media “Their experience will provide us with invaluable guidance as we grow the organisation to secure a leadership position within the emerging mobile advertising and mobile services markets. We have al ready demonstrated the capabilities and robustness of our platforms in key reference customer deployments, now we are in a position to build value within the organisation on the back of current successes”.
Media Contacts:
Direct Enquiries:
Jeremy Copp: +44 208 390 2204
press@rapid-mobile.com
AxiCom for Rapid Mobile Media:
Andy Riley: +44 208 392 4073
andy.riley@axicom.com