Unity Mobile gets $10M funding for expansion

By Mickey Alam Khan

September 10, 2008

Hard-to-beat

SAN FRANCISCO – Unity Mobile, a mobile services and infrastructure provider, has bagged $10 million in Series-A funding to more aggressively push the company’s offerings that mesh the Web with mobile.

The funding, from Unity parent U-Turn Media Group, is key to Unity’s plans to better help media firms and marketers with the mobile Internet, mobile applications, mobile advertising and SMS campaign management as they monetize their subscriber database.

“Our strategy is to be more like a Web services provider than another applications provider,” said Daniel West, CEO of Unity.

Based in St. Petersburg, FL, with an office in Prague, Czech Republic, Unity is a key component of seven-year-old, 80-employee U-Turn Media. Here’s a Q&A with Mr. West – who joined Unity a year ago with a new management team – on his plans for the company. Excerpts from the interview:

What is the funding designed to do?
Funding, provided internally through parent company U-Turn Media Group, is designed to accelerate growth. 

Daniel West is CEO of Unity Mobile

We have developed significant amounts of technology and have already built a strong development team. Moving forward, we’re increasing our development horsepower to continue packaging our comprehensive technology as an easy to use, Web-based service. 

We will also be adding sales and marketing resources to facilitate our rapid customer acquisition and services as well as channel partner development and services.

What are Unity’s growth plans?
We plan to increase our support and services to main focus regions, including the United States, key EU markets and the Middle East. 

Sweet design

As we have a good base of customers already, we plan to scale operations based on a model we know works and meets the needs of our customers.

Who is the company targeting for its services?
We currently focus on four verticals: media, entertainment, consumer brands and consumer services. 

We break these verticals in to size segments, each with a unique go-to-market strategy. The segments are straightforward: Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies within each vertical.

What types of services does Unity offer?
Unity is a unified infrastructure and services provider that enables and powers Mobile Internet, mobile applications, mobile advertising, SMS campaign management and mobile content distribution.

The solution, packaged as a Web-based service, also provides the analytics and reports necessary to manage and optimize operations, as well as create and utilize mobile CRM – all contained in one place. 

Which sweet spot has Unity identified as needing more attention in mobile?
Unity is a broad-based solution. However, the immediate areas we’re getting strong pull are from organizations which are pretty overwhelmed and simply not interested in having to navigate the cluttered point-solution landscape to assemble all they need in order to execute successful mobile strategies. 

We’re getting a range of very seasoned, knowledgeable organizations and teams as well as many first-time users of mobile. 

As the service moves from beta to live, I imagine we’ll get the bulk of new publishers coming in from the Tier 2 market segment across verticals.

We are continually adding vertical-specific features and widgets to more rapidly serve customers’ needs.

What do you hope to get out of this CTIA show?
I’m mainly meeting with customers and prospects, but also meeting with talented individuals looking to make a move to development, sales and support at Unity Mobile.

Your take on mobile marketing and media?
While there are pockets and spikes of activity in categories well discussed, what is see as the next wave is simply the explosion of addressable market.

The drivers are in or falling in place: better and faster networks, better and faster devices, all-you-can-eat data plans, and a growing content and information ecosystem, i.e. content providers and content consumers finding each other through search, marketplaces and communities. 

Marketers already see or are fast learning that mobile is a viable method to drive awareness, consumption and transactions and are simply looking for solutions that reduce barriers to consumption. 

For our part, Unity’s role is to develop the innovations that remove the barriers to consumption, namely high cost, long lead times, access to audience and the need for specialized skills. 

What’s next for unity?
As you know, the main challenge a person in my role has is pointing and keeping everyone going in the same direction. 

We have an amazing team – super-smart, experienced, motivated. Our next goals focus on excellence in execution, product, services and support. 

If we do our job to the high standards we set, we will be successful in delivering value to our constituents for a very long time.