Founded in 2009 by CEO Scott Lahman and based in Marina del Rey, California, textPlus provides free and low-cost mobile calling services globally. Its app is available for iOS, Android and Windows smartphones as well as iPod touch and tablets. The company raised $18M in its fourth funding round and said it will use the capital for international expansion, product development and strategic acquisitions. In conjunction with the financing, John Salter, Partner at The Raine Group, joined textPlus' board. textPlus also acquired Los Angeles-based startup Jarvus; Jarvus CEO Chris Vaughn and CTO Raymond Jia will join textPlus to help lead business development and product development. GOGII is the maker of textPlus, a social messaging app offering free SMS, group conversations, and topic-driven community chat groups. textPlus includes photo sharing, search, and profile personalization and runs on iPhone, iPad, Android and any device that carries SMS. Launched in June 2009, the app positions itself as a first mover in the free SMS space while competing with group‑texting apps like GroupMe, Fast Society, FreeText and even Facebook. As of the article, textPlus has over 14 million downloads, 7.7 million monthly active users, sends nearly 32 million messages per day and has delivered more than 7 billion messages since launch. Founder Scott Lahman says the company is expanding across competitive verticals and sees significant upside for group texting features. GOGII, Inc. develops a feature-rich text messaging application designed to deliver rich texting environments and features. The company is based in Marina del Rey, California. Scott Lahman, CEO and co-founder, has said the financing will be used to expand the product to more carriers, handsets and users. GOGII previously raised a Series A from Kleiner Perkins’ iFund in December 2007. The current financing round builds on that early investor relationship and supports the company's product and distribution growth plans. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Gogii builds textPlus, a chat client that layers multi-way group chat on top of standard SMS. Its servers aggregate multi-way SMS sessions and present them as a single group conversation on users' phones. textPlus supports unlimited participants, allows people to drop in and out of conversations, works on any SMS-capable phone, and the iPhone app is free and requires no sign-up. For now Gogii's sole revenue source is adMob advertising, and CEO Scott Lahman said the company is considering other monetization approaches. The company views its potential market as everyone with a text plan. Management includes CEO Scott Lahman, president Austin Murray and chief creative officer Zachary Norman, veterans of JAMDAT Mobile (sold to Electronic Arts for $680 million in 2005).

Total raised

$46M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Oct 2012