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Urban Airship raises $15.1 million in Series C round from Verizon and Salesforce.com

To go towards global expansion

Urban Airship raises $15.1 million in Series C round from Verizon and Salesforce.com

Urban Airship, the push notification platform, has announced it's raised $15.1 million in its third round of funding.

This was led by Salesforce.com and Verizon Wireless, alongside existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures.

These funds will be used to expand sales and business development efforts and to help Urban Airship explore new opportunities, including tablets, ultra-notebooks, desktops, TVs and set-top boxes.

It recently bought location-based platform SimpleGeo for $3.5 million.

Flying high

Urban Airship has just passed a lifetime total of 7 billion notifications and claims to be serving around 1 billion per month. Other figures are equally impressive, with 20,000 customers and 30,000 apps across iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

It has seen its API traffic increase by 1,000 percent in the October 2011.

"With the increased momentum, we have also started to develop great relationships with companies like Salesforce.com and Verizon," read a press release.

"Both companies have been interested in our platforms and how we might be able to work together and participating in our financing was a way to kick that off."

CEO Scott Kveton spoke about the funding round in an interview with VentureBeat.

"This is a great way for us to have a close relationship with Verizon and take our relationship to the next level," he said.

"We're thinking hard about when we want to dig deeper into the devices themselves. We wanted to take a significant round because we feel there's a pretty unique opportunity to grab some market share right now."

[source: Urban Airship, VentureBeat]

Matt Sakuraoka-Gilman
Matt Sakuraoka-Gilman
When Matt was 7 years old he didn't write to Santa like the other little boys and girls. He wrote to Mario. When the rotund plumber replied, Matt's dedication to a life of gaming was established. Like an otaku David Carradine, he wandered the planet until becoming a writer at Pocket Gamer.