The rumours have been circulating for some weeks about Truphone’s series B financing. Today Truphone announced a raise of £16.5m, or approximately $33 million, this after acquiring operator Sim4Travel a week ago. The raise was smaller than some of the rumours intimated (numbers as high as $60 million were being bandied about), but is still a substantial amount of money.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the press release, though, was the final couple of paragraphs, which read
The company has developed a carrier-grade, global operator infrastructure including a global network of SIP gateways, a Nokia Siemens Networks mobile network Home Location Register (HLR) and a GSM identifier. The infrastructure is capable of supporting 40 million customers worldwide.
This is all enabled by a series of global agreements with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers.
This odd bit of information, for a funding release, suggests that the company is planning to do much more than operate a simple WiFi voice service, and maybe more than providing low cost SIMs for travellers.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Truphone defines a new business category I call MVNO 2.0, and done well.
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