Today text message enhancement invi announced that it has raised $2 million USD in new funding in a round of investment led by Seven Seas Ventures. The funds will be used to help the company support the app’s rapid growth and further development.
Led by Jeff Xiong, former chief technology officer of Tencent, and Jack Xu, the former co-president and chief technology officer of SINA Corporation, the funding commitment took place through Xu and Xiong’s investment group, Seven Seas Ventures. Streamline Ventures, InnoValley, F50 and Pre-Angel completed the round of funding.
“Mobile messaging has a huge impact on people’s daily lives, and we are very excited to work with invi team to bring further innovation to this space”, said Xu.
“invi is the first smartphone messaging application that enables seamless multitasking and sharing. This experience should be standard for all mobile messaging apps in the near future,” said Xiong.
“this experience should be standard for all mobile messaging apps in the near future”
“We are honored to have Jack and Jeff join us, bringing exceptional experience in the messaging domain to continue to make invi the best SMS replacement on the market,” said Iddo Tal, founder and CEO of invi.
Xu and Xiong are both leaders in the global messaging space, bringing invaluable knowledge and expertise to the invi team of advisors. Xu’s time at SINA Corporation centered on Weibo, the most influential social media in China with over 200 million active users. Prior to SINA, Xu was the vice president at Cisco and eBay. While Xiong was at Tencent, he managed the product and engineering of the messaging app WeChat, which has over 550 million active users.
“People spend a lot of time trying to find a messaging app that suits their needs. In the last 10 days alone, we’ve received over 5,000 messages from users with positive feedback and requests,” said Tal. “We try to respond to each and every one of these requests to improve their experience. We’ve learned a lot and it’s amazing to see how eager people are to upgrade their SMS experience.”
invi is led by four co-founders: Iddo Tal, Noam Etzion-Rosenberg, Adrien Aubel and Nir Meidan. In 2013, invi secured a $3 million in funding from Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Atlantic Bridge, Alpha Investment, UpWest Labs, and Silicon Valley angels from Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Groupon, Spotify, SRI, Comcast, Chegg and others.
invi’s investment round follows its recent feature on Google Play as one of the best apps to replace your native SMS app. With many exciting features already available, invi is actively updating its service with the integration of new mini-apps and enabling rich media engagement for its users.