Lango is a picture-messaging app that relaunched in March after pivoting from a prior global focus to target the U.S. market. Its core product is weekly topical pop-culture emoji and retro icon/sticker packs, with 8–10 new icons released each week and retro packs on Thursdays. The company is positioning those packs to piggyback on current TV/gossip trends and to target enthusiast communities via influencer "queen bees." Lango says some previous users transferred to the relaunched app; it previously hit one million users four months after its original 2012 launch. The firm reports that 60% of its user base came from friend invites and that 85% of messages sent on its platform use its icons. The relaunch shifts the product away from auto-adding emoji per word toward more descriptive, meme-like social sharing to compete with larger messaging platforms. Zlango is an Israeli phone-based application offering an icon-based mobile messaging service in which users compose short messages using representational images rather than typed text. Users can also add images to the basic icons, creating a customizable pictorial language. The app has grown through close relationships with carriers, which view Zlango as a way to drive higher SMS usage or provide services for a flat fee. Zlango is partnered with Pelephone in Israel, Orange and Cellcom in ESC, P4 in Poland, and bMobile in the Caribbean. The company recently received a $12 million investment from Benchmark Capital and Accel. TechCrunch covered the deal.

Total raised

$18M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2013