When Google bought mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in November 2009, 4IFNO CEO Zaw Thet said that he received a couple of phone calls from investment bankers and potential buyers who where were sniffing around the space. When Apple bought Quattro Wireless for $275 million two months later, he says his phone started to ring off the hook.
Why? Because 4INFO is usually described as the AdMob of SMS advertising. That isn’t a very good description of the company, but it’s enough to make everyone think that the company is next in line to close a big acquisition. And that last part just may be true.
The company, which has raised around $40 million in venture capital, is where companies go when they want to create a “mailing list” of SMS subscribers. For example – when Zynga began testing SMS notifications in December, they turned to 4INFO to power the product. 4INFO has 250 premier publishers, plus a couple of thousand more that use its self service platform.
4INFO offers customers a publishing platform, which is tools to manage SMS subscribers and send them content. They also run an ad network for SMS ads, and a SMS gateway to handle the carrier relationships and charges. 4INFO’s larger publishers pay as much as $15,000 per month to use the platform. Those publishers can run their own ads, or use 4INFO’s ads with a revenue split (self service customers have no choice but to accept 4INFO’s ads).
4INFO has 50 million U.S. phone numbers stored on behalf of publishers. And they are beginning to roll out an international product as well.
I sat met with Thet last week to see the company’s San Mateo offices and talk about the 4INFO business. He answered all of my questions, and even said the right thing at the end when I asked who’d be acquiring him. “We’re building an independent company,” he said. Which is exactly what everyone says right before they get bought.
Founded in 2004, with a consistent track record of innovation and reliability, 4INFO is a diversified mobile advertising, media, and technology company that reaches millions of mobile consumers daily and touches them billions of times a month. AdHaven by 4INFO, recently spun out as its own division, is the industry’s first mobile audience platform and network. The AdHaven Mobile Audience Platform includes a next-generation mobile ad server with the most advanced targeting capabilities in the mobile advertising industry, and...
Zaw Thet is a veteran entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of search, social networking, mobile, and advertising since the age of 19. In 2011, Zaw was selected as one of ten entrepreneurs to serve on the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council. Currently, Zaw is incubating two stealth projects, as a co-founder and chairman of the board, that cross between the mobile, social, gamification, loyalty, ecommerce, video, and advertising sectors. His success as an entrepreneur and angel...
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