Index Ventures

Boku receives £8 Million Investment

June 23 2009

BOKU, Inc. today announced its payments service for global consumers wishing to make online purchases of digital and virtual goods with their mobile phones. The company is creating a new standard for the mobile, by bringing bank-grade mobile payments to the Web.  As part of today’s news, the company announced the following:

·         The acquisition of Paymo, based in San Francisco, CA and the Mobillcash business, originally founded in the United Kingdom, two leading mobile payments companies with a global reach of over 1.6 billion users in 53 countries on 193 mobile operators.

·         The securing of venture funding of £8 million, led by Benchmark Capital (Kevin Harvey), with participation from UK-based Index Ventures (Danny Rimer) and Khosla Ventures (David Weiden), a financing trio with decades of experience in revolutionary consumer web services, including Skype, Tellme, Ofoto, eBay, Second Life and Twitter.

·         Additions to its management team, including:o    Mark Britto as CEO, with a background spanning twenty years of management, sales and payment roles at Amazon, Ingenio, and FirstUSA.o    Paul McGuire as SVP of Business Development.o    James Patmore as Managing Director of EMEA.

o    Additional team members with executive experience in finance and technology companies including AT&T Interactive, PayPal, Apple, FICO, Google, O2 UK, Bank of America and eBay.

“We’re very excited about the future of BOKU – with Mobillcash’s European success, Paymo’s international reach, and stellar additions to the management team, the company is now very well positioned to lead the mobile payments market,” stated Danny Rimer, Partner at Index Ventures.

 “These acquisitions help BOKU continue its mission of building a global operator-supported mobile payments service and enables our partners capitalize on the rapid growth of the multi-billion pound online virtual goods and microtransactions markets,” stated James Patmore, Managing Director of EMEA.  

BOKU’s acquisitions of Paymo and the Mobillcash business makes it the leading global mobile payments platform with over 1.6 billion potential customers in 53 countries on 193 mobile operators.  The market for online payments via mobile is being driven by the rapid, global growth of social networks, virtual goods and games, the popularity of mobile applications, and the large number of unbanked customers who have access to mobile phones, but not credit cards or bank accounts: With over 1 billion applications served, the iPhone has changed how people use and relate to their phones; The virtual goods and gaming market is worth $8 billion today and growing; On Facebook, 200 million users can now access 135 thousand virtual applications and games; The gap between the banked and underbanked is large, with 4 billion mobile phones but only 2 billion bank accounts worldwide.