“Our current investors have given their consent for extended funding and we expect to close the transaction during this year,” he said here on Tuesday. NetXcell had raised $1 million (Rs 4 crore) in its first round of funding from Lee, a venture partner of Ignition Partners, and Ruderman Capital last year.
The 72-strong company, which offers technologies like short message service centre (carrier grade messaging platform) and gateways (SMS, unstructured supplementary service data, and WAP), besides interactive voice response (IVR) and voice outbound dialling to telecom operators, is planning to become a value-added services provider for media companies as well. As part of this, it is set to launch Ad Axis, a mobile advertisement engine that enables delivery of targeted contextual advertisement on the mobile phone. “This product will take NetXcell to a new arena — mobile advertisements — which is currently a-few-million-dollar market but is bound to grow to $70 billion by 2012. At present, we are in talks with a customer to do a pilot and plan to introduce the product in India and the US this October,” Puskoor said, adding that two more products were in the pipeline which would be launched by the year-end. Stating that the company had so far been majorly focusing on Airtel and to some extent on Aircel, garnering 90 per cent revenues from them, Puskoor said the company had implemented its voice outbound dialling solution at all the 11 circles of Idea, which is expected to bring in Rs 2 crore revenue this year. The eight-year-old company reported revenues of Rs 5 crore for the 2007-08 financial year, and its outlook for the current year is Rs 18 crore. NetXcell’s clientele base in India includes Airtel, Hutch, Idea, BSNL, Reliance and Aircel. Source : Business Standard |