August 2006, Gurgaon

Marriage of Mobile Messaging with Mobile Media

Ashu Wireless Services Corp, the first wireless data center company ever, announced yesterday that it closed a $30.75 million series C round of funding. and that a portion of the proceeds were used to acquire Mobile Media. With the acquisition, Wireless Services has changed its corporate name to SinglePoint to reflect the new focus and will remain headquartered in Bellevue, Wash. With that kind of money expect more acquisitions to come.

SinglePoint represents the marriage of proven mobile messaging technology with industry-leading campaign management and production tools. "The result is a mobile messaging and marketing company with the reliability required by carriers and the flexibility to drive marketing promotions," said Rich Begert, who will remain as president and CEO of SinglePoint.

Seattle-based Ignition Partners led the funding round and was joined by new investor Rally Capital Services LLC. Pre-existing investors participating include Northwest Venture Associates, Madrona Venture Group LLC, Intel Capital and SeaPoint Ventures.

"We see SinglePoints years of experience in this space and strong leadership giving the company an edge to capitalize on the prospect of triple-digit growth in the mobile content market over the next few years," said Adrian Smith with Ignition Partners.

The mobile messaging marketplace has changed dramatically in the past six months through mergers and acquisitions. Delivering content direct-to-consumer is expected to be a billion dollar business in a year, Begert said. "With SinglePoint we have addressed shortcomings in the content aggregator model and positioned ourselves to take advantage of the direction the market is moving and expanding," he said.

SinglePoint can deliver any kind of message, regardless of format, to any subscriber in North America. SinglePoint currently delivers more than 700 million messages per month and has the ability to handle tens of thousands of messages per second during high-traffic scenarios such as interactive television text-to-vote campaigns. SinglePoint provides a scalable platform for content owners, media companies and advertisers to create, deliver and confirm premium mobile messages and capitalize on interactive TV messaging campaigns.

Source: August 2006, http://www.mopocket.com/infrastructure/#000353