Truphone rakes in £16.5m series B
The rumours have been circulating for some weeks about Truphone’s series B financing. Today Truphone announced a raise of £16.5m, or approximately $33 million, this after acquiring operator Sim4Travel a week ago. The raise was smaller than some of the rumours intimated (numbers as high as $60 million were being bandied about), but is still a substantial amount of money.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the press release, though, was the final couple of paragraphs, which read
The company has developed a carrier-grade, global operator infrastructure including a global network of SIP gateways, a Nokia Siemens Networks mobile network Home Location Register (HLR) and a GSM identifier. The infrastructure is capable of supporting 40 million customers worldwide.
This is all enabled by a series of global agreements with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers.
This odd bit of information, for a funding release, suggests that the company is planning to do much more than operate a simple WiFi voice service, and maybe more than providing low cost SIMs for travellers.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Truphone defines a new business category I call MVNO 2.0, and done well.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:58 am
[...] Truphone, which we covered in our New Service provider feature, landed $33 million series B financing, which they’ll using to build out their network (yes, the run at least part of [...]
April 19th, 2008 at 4:38 am
[...] Truphone rakes in £16.5m series B I simply think the Truphone deal is really cool! Yes they allude to a lot more and I expect announcements to be forthcoming. Congrats to Truphone. (tags: truphone voip mobile gsm) [...]