fring accelerates mainstream accessibility with third round funding

LONDON – 30 April 2009 – fring™ (www.fring.com [1]), the leading mobile Internet community and communication service, today announced the successful completion of its third round of funding to accelerate fring’s growth, openness and business activities. All previous fring investors participated in this round including U.S. based North Bridge Venture Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Veritas Venture Partners and VenFin Limited.

Avi Shechter, fring co-founder and CEO said: “With this new funding round we will accelerate the realization of our ongoing commitment to make fring even more accessible, relevant and easy to use, therefore reducing practical barriers for mainstream users as well as 3^rd party developers and partners who have expressed continued interest in fring and the fring platform.” He continued, “Combining community, experience and communication fring is already  turning the mobile into the ultimate social device by mashing up people’s favourite forms and modes of communication even beyond what the fixed PC environment can offer. With this new investment all our investors recognize our leadership in this emerging paradigm shift, and demonstrate their long-term commitment to our vision. We plan to add to the fring experience and make it an ever more central part of fringsters’ social lives”.

This additional funding will be used to continue making fring more easily accessible and relevant to users and partners. With more supported platforms, devices, add-on services contributed by developers worldwide, continuously improved usability and rich features, fring is turning the mainstream mobile device into the social nexus for users to share, interact and communicate with all their cross-community mobile and online friends. For example, fring users share experiences with friends on facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and more, while communicating via Skype^®, MSN^® Messenger, GoogleTalk ^TM, Yahoo!^TM, AIM^® and ICQ^® among others, and further enhanced with functional and location based services like WeFi, all through a single social experience from their simple fring interface on their mobile device.

Shechter concluded, “Our millions of users actively sharing, interacting and communicating over fring today will benefit greatly as fring becomes even more accessible to the rest of the mobile world, ready to shift their online social nexus to their mobile phones.”

 

 

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About fring™

 

fring™ is an award-winning mobile internet community and communication service that allows friends to connect, share experiences and enhance their communities together from their mobile device.  They do this using a combination of proprietary fring utilities and the internet’s most popular social and community applications including Skype®, Facebook®, MSN® Messenger, GoogleTalk™, Twitter, Yahoo! ™, AIM®, ICQ®, Orkut®, Last.fm.

fring is 100% free with no subscription costs; consumers simply pay for the data they use under their existing mobile operator agreement. fring is completely PC independent, it requires no additional hardware, has no geographical or location limitations and operates on any available mobile internet connection: 3G, Wi-Fi, GPRS, EDGE & WiMax.

fring has experienced phenomenal global adoption, with millions of users now enjoying the fring experience in more than 200 countries worldwide and half a million new fringsters joining the fring community each month.
fring operates on Nokia S60 devices, Samsung S60, iPhone & iPod Touch, Sony Ericsson UIQ Smartphones, Windows Mobile, J2ME, Linux Mobile & Intel’s Moblin devices, which currently represent more than 1,000 mobile handsets (the full list is available at http://www.fring.com [1] )

•    fring™  fringster™  fringing freedom™, fringFriends™, fringAdd-on™ and the fring™  logo are all registered trademarks or trademarks of fringland ltd.  All rights reserved.
•    Other trademarks are the trademarks of their respective owners. fring is independent from, and not affiliated with, those trademarks owners.
•    The “Symbian” trademark is a brand and asset of Symbian Software Ltd.
•    This product uses Skype™ but is not endorsed or certified by Skype

 

For media enquiries please contact:

 

Gil Regev: gilr@fring,com [2] - Tel +972 54  268 7906

 

 

About North Bridge Venture Partners

 

North Bridge Venture Partners is an active, early-stage venture capital fund based outside the Boston, Massachusetts area. For North Bridge, success is a partnership with management that produces leading public companies in large emerging markets. For more information, visit www.nbvp.com [3].

 

About Pitango Venture Capital

 

Pitango Venture Capital, the leading venture capital firm in Israel, has been investing in technology entrepreneurs since 1993. With offices in Israel and Silicon Valley California, Pitango currently manages over $1 billion in committed capital invested in more than 100 companies. Pitango specializes in providing long-term support and value-added services to its portfolio companies, with a focus on seed to late-stage companies in Communications, Network and Storage, Wireless and Mobile, Enterprise Software and Internet Infrastructure, and Life Sciences including Biotech and Medical Devices. 

Visit www.pitango.com [4] for more information.

 

About Veritas Venture Partners

 

Veritas Venture Partners is Israel''s most experienced venture capital firm. Veritas invests primarily in technology-based companies at the seed and very early stages of their lives.   With a base in Herzliya, Israel, and an office in Atlanta, it focuses on opportunities originating in (or related to) Israel, or along the East Coast of the U.S. Veritas'' primary areas of focus are enterprise software, network communications and healthcare. 
Visit www.veritasvc.com [5] for more information.

 

About VenFin Limited

 

VenFin is an active private equity and venture capital investor focusing on high growth investment opportunities.  The company has assets of $1billion which span the telecommunications, software, energy and media sectors.  Visit http://www.venfin.com/ [6] for more information.