Its a bumper start to the week for two lucky, lucky wireless startups.
Enterprise wireless messaging developer
Good Technology Inc. scored "$45 million plus" in its latest round of financing, which was led by
Crosslink Capital.
Meanwhile -- despite sporting a name that sounds like a nasty skin condition -- 3G chip developer
Sirific Wireless Corp. has got $17 million its series B round, led by
TD Capital Ventures.
Good 'n' plenty: Good Technology makes software that enables users to acesss email and other corporate applications wirelessly on their cellphones, PDAs, and laptops.
It plans to spend the cash influx on beefing up its sales and marketing efforts.
The startup, which claims around 2,000 enterprise customers, is perhaps best known for the long-running patent dispute with its main rival in the mobile messaging field,
Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; Toronto: RIM), which makes the BlackBerry wireless email device.
The firms settled the spat late in March this year. Good stated that it will pay an undisclosed amount of quarterly royalties to RIM, as well as a lump sum in the first quarter of fiscal 2005.
Good's millions are another sign that the wireless email market is starting to wake up again after a bumpy couple of years for startups in this market. Carrier-focused email rival
Seven Networks Inc. recently filed initial papers for an IPO that could raise it up to $115 million (see
Seven Plots $115M IPO).
Terrific Sirific: Sirific is pushing its single-chip design as the first silicon that can support multi-band enhanced data for GSM environments (EDGE) implementations -- in the real world, this should mean that mobile phones that use the chip will be able to download data at a couple of hundred kbit/s and be used on networks around the world.
Sirific says its first products will be "released to production at the end of 2004."
— Dan Jones, Site Editor,
Unstrung
