MessageMe sees more than 1M active users since release, announces seed round funding

MessageMe today announced that it now sees more than 1 million active users in its messaging app MessageMe since launching on March 7 for iOS and Android. MessageMe also announced that the company received $1.9 million in seed round funding, with participation from True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Social+Capital Partnership. Angel investors of MessageMe include Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu, Rex Ng and Suleman Ali. MessageMe is a mobile messenger, allowing users to send more than just a text to friends and family by tapping a "+" button, which slides up another screen with buttons that users can choose from to send a picture, doodle, video, voice message, location update, or piece of music. For example, users can send a picture from Google Images, music from iTunes or a video from YouTube, without having to leave the app. MessageMe joins a highly competitive, and lucrative, app genre filled with the likes of Chinese Internet giant Tencent's WeChat, NHN Japan's Line, South Korean KakaoTalk and U.S. messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Snapchat. "Our space is very competitive," says Arjun Sethi, co-founder and CEO of MessageMe. "There are lots of great companies out there already building apps. The one core principal and philosophy we have around what were building is that we think about the way users communicate and the way that we want them to communicate longer term as well. That fundamental idea is very different from the other companies." Sethi tells Inside Mobile Apps that his company is not focused on immediately monetizing users through advertisements and other means. Although MessageMe does have two place-holder buttons labeled "Sticker" and "Money". Sethi adds that those two buttons are two forms of monetization strategies for the app, which are currently in the testing phase. Monetizing through a special emoji, aka stickers, isn't anything new. Apps like NHN's Line have been monetizing via users purchasing stickers through in-app purchasing for months. MessageMe is also currently seeing users sending more than 500 notifications per second worldwide as well as more than 10 million doodles and four million songs on iTunes shared in the U.S. Last Friday, MessageMe, which launched with the ability for users to find friends via their phone contacts or Facebook, reportedly lost the Find Friends feature for Facebook. Although the app was updated on Monday, users still can't find their friends via Facebook, only phone contacts work right now. Communication app Voxer as well as Twitter's Vine app had the Find Friends feature get cut off by Facebook. According to our traffic tracking service AppData, MessageMe is the No. 100 ranked app in the overall top free apps category and the No. 13 ranked app in the social networking category. For Android, MessageMe landed at the No. 59 spot in the communication category.

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MessageMe sees more than 1M active users since release, announces seed round funding

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