VC's love Nimbuzz, give $15 million

Holland based Nimbuzz , a mobile VoIP startup has raised a $15 million second round led by South African media firm Naspers’ Myriad International Holdings (MIH) digital arm. Currently it supports more than 22 brands and over 500 models. It supports different clients for PC, Mobile and widgets for social networking. So far, the company has raised a total of $25 million dollars. The new money shall be used to support Windows Mobile, Phone and Android.

Here are some of the features that nimbuzz Mobile supports:
• Call
• Chat/Chatrooms/Groupchat
• Text messaging
• Share photos, music, video
• Send voice messages
• Manage address book
• Set status
• Buzz (get friends online)

The list of IM clients it supports is very impressive. From nimbuzz mobile client, users can interact with Google Talk, Skype, AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, jabber, MySpace and facebook. Nimbuzz is not lone warrior in this arena, there are quite a few startups like Fring, Mig33, TruPhone that support similar features.

It has close to a million users with 5000 users signing up everyday. That’s impressive. However, not sure what is their revenue model. It’s kind of interesting how they could raise $15 million dollars without any solid revenue generating strategy. Apparently they claim to have deals with 10 major social networking and 3 mobile operators. That kind of explains the VC’s interest towards nimbuzz.

Off late, we are seeing lot of startups that want to play the social media aggregator and unified interface role. I guess by the time Yahoo OneConnect is made public, we would have tones of other clones that pretty much do the same thing with a small twist here and there. The potential in these apps are huge and iam sure there is room for multiple players. If you guys know of any mobile clients that does the same thing, let me know.