Waterloo-based Kik secured $19.5 million in Series B funding, as they look to up their game in the mobile messaging wars. This funding round was led by Foundation Capital and including RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Foundation Capital’s Partner Anamitra Banerji (an early staffer at Twitter) will be joining Kik’s board of directors. The funding will also be used at a crucial time as they look to
Kik’s free mobile messaging service has more than 50 million users, they also have six HTML games that users can play while on the service, and Founder Ted Livingston says the company plans to open the door to third-party developers “later this year.” This “Card” feature will now allow Kik to turn their product into an ecosystem for developers which is part of the key to success for any strong web-based service on the market today such as Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite.
Recently, Whatsapp’s Founder shared from a stage at a conference that his competitive service has more users than Twitter, which currently says it has over 200 million. Whatsapp was also in the news recently as rumours surface that Google was looking to acquire them for $1 billion.