Deutsche Telekom’s VC Firm Makes Strategic Investment In Pinger | TechCrunch
For the last few years we've been tracking the growth of a service called Textfree, offered by San Jose-based startup Pinger. As the name implies, Textfree has a very attractive value proposition: you sign up, it gives you a free, real, telephone number, and you can send text messages and make phone calls with it free of charge — the service makes most of its money by displaying ads alongside the texts. It's also massively popular: last month alone, users sent and received a total of 2 billion text messages, and it's one of the most downloaded iOS apps of all time. Even more impressive is the fact that the vast majority of their efforts have been concentrated in the US alone — Pinger is preparing to sweep across Europe this year. Pinger's service is potentially disruptive to the telecom world, which is why it's so notable that the company is now getting in bed with one of the biggest names in the business: it's raised a $7.5 million funding round led by T Venture, the VC arm of international carrier giant Deutsche Telekom.
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