Skyfire Raises $13 million in Series B Funding

Greg Kumparak

Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Skyfire Labs Inc., makers of the “game-changing” Skyfire mobile browser, announced today that they have raised $13 million in Series B funding. This round of funding is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and includes previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures.

This brings the total funding up to $17.8 million, following a $4.8 million Series A round in June of last year. As part of the deal, Jake Seid, Lightspeed’s Managing Director, will be joining Skyfire’s Board of Directors.

Skyfire is a mobile browser which offsets a good amount of the page rendering workload to a server, freeing up the handset’s CPU and RAM to crunch things most mobile browsers leave out — namely, Flash and AJAX. Check out the demo video here.

This additional funding places further pressure on Skyfire’s main browsing rival, Opera Mobile. While Skyfire is (tentatively) free, Opera Mobile goes for 24 bucks. With Opera Mobile 9.5 facing delays, a free alternative with rich media support is beginning to look mighty tempting.

Company: Skyfire Labs
Website: skyfire.com
Launch Date: April 2006
Funding: $40.8M

Skyfire is dedicated to leveraging the power of cloud computing to radically improve the mobile Internet experience for both operators and their consumers.  Skyfire’s innovative, next-generation carrier cloud approach to mobile video and data optimization provides wireless operators with huge cost savings, elastic capacity, and the ability to surgically enhance quality of experience on a per-stream level. The company has also introduced the first mobile browser extension platform to enable robust contextual & social browsing, as well as enhanced monetization opportunities...

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