Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it’s been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android — a five-fold increase on the 1 million that downloaded the app in its first 10 days.
MessageMe aims to carve out a name for itself by offering more ways than the rest of the pack — which includes WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber and Facebook (from which MessageMe gained some notoriety when it was restricted from using Facebook’s social graph API to find friends to use the app) — for users to communicate with each other on its messaging platform. In its case, this is done through notifications via text messages, but also pictures, doodles, video, voice, location and music sent from one user to another. Altogether, usage of these has risen three-fold, to 1,500 per second from 500 65 days ago.
From what we understand, although MessageMe is partly founded by people with extensive gaming experience — Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal both worked together at social games company LOLapps (acquired by 6waves in 2011) — it will be messaging, not games, that will be the revenue driver for the company. Also: no plans to add in advertising, nor to charge for the app. Instead, it will build out premium messaging features such as stickers and money transfers.







