Mobidia lands additional Series A funding

Mobile content service performance management company Mobidia announced it raised Cdn$3.75 million in its second round of Series A funding, doubling the Vancouver-based firm's total Series A investment to Cdn$7.0 million. Existing investor BDC Venture Capital spearheaded the round, with current investors British Columbia Discovery Fund and B.C. Advantage Funds also contributing.

Mobidia's .wave multimedia services software is an end-to-end solution that promises wireless carriers the tools to manage and monetize new services and apps, in particular user-generated content and mobile video. "The new funding gives us the runway to recruit and build out our executive team and go through our first set of trials with customers," Mobidia CEO Gary Tauss said in an interview with FierceMobileContent. "Carriers are very adrift in this area. They see the potential in all of the movie clips sitting on camera phones, but they don't know how to monetize them."

According to Tauss, Mobidia is already trialing the .wave platform with a major North American carrier--reportedly Cingular/AT&T--and given the recent emphasis on user-generated content within the mainstream media and within the mobile entertainment sphere, the time seems right for the company to make its move. "Carriers don't like to change--they wouldn't do anything new or different if they had their druthers," Tauss told FMC. "But they're already rolling down the path of spending millions to upgrade networks, and they need to fill those pipes with something that is profitable for them."

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