09.27.06
Visto raise $51M of new funding
According to VentureBeat, Visto just raised another $51M from mostly existing investors. What is going on with this space? Can the revenue really justify this kind of investment? With the new $51M, Vista would have received over $280M based on venture source ($350 according to VentureBeat) in venture funding. Its competitors such as Good Technologies and Seven are big capital sink as well. Good raised about $250M, and Seven got close to $100M. Both numbers are conservative.
Everyone is going after push E-mail market inside or outside of enterprise and think they can make it, well, look at market shares, none of these players come even close to have a decent market share compare to RIM. With new Microsoft Mobile Exchange server, it is a tough game inside the enterprise. Microsoft may not have enough features and functionality, but decent baseline is enough to kill startups. Then how much market share can these vendors win in the carrier on push e-mail? Is white-label solution attractive enough to justify the investment? We might as well wait to see how BlackBerry Pearl does first…
