Going After SMBs, Mobile Website Maker DudaMobile Raises $6M Series B

DudaMobile, a company which helps convert existing websites into mobile-optimized versions, has just raised $6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital, an Israeli-based VC firm which has investments in fring, Shaker, VideoSurf, Pageonce, Boxee and others.

The startup, which began life as a white label offering before making its self-serve platform available to businesses last year, says it plans to use the additional funding to expand its engineering and marketing teams, with a special focus on targeting its products towards the SMB market.

As a part of the new round, Pitango’s Eitan Bek will join DudaMobile’s board of directors. Previously, DudaMobile had raised funding from other investors, including board chairman Oren Zeev, StubHub founder Jeff Flhur and Audible.com CEO Don Katz. To date, the company has raised $8.3 million.

In August, DudaMobile launched a self-serve platform for website conversions which allows website owners to instantly create mobile sites. However, unlike some competitors’ products, the tool doesn’t just build a mobile site, it builds one that stays in sync with the desktop-optimized version as changes are applied. The freemium offering creates sites that works on all smartphones, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

At the time of the launch, the company said it had over 175,000 websites hosted on its platform, 35% of which were small business sites.

In January, the company reported crossing the 1 million mobile websites mark. And today, DudaMobile is reporting that it recently broke 1.4 million websites built and hosted on its platform, and since the beginning of 2012, its user base has grown by more than 100,000 new users each month.

The company is also hinting at a “very exciting partnership” in the works, which it plans to announce in early April. According to VP of Marketing Dennis Mink, the company can’t say anything about the news yet, but describes it as “a biggie for a startup like us.”

The startup already has partnerships in place with several companies, including Webs.com, Logoworks by HP, AT&T, Yahoo, eniro and more. When DudaMobile’s platform is used by partners, in some cases, it’s integrated into their own backend website creation platforms. Other times, it’s made available as a white label offering.

Pricing for its newer self-serve platform, meanwhile, starts at $0 for a certain number of pages and smaller amount of bandwidth. The premium plan is $9/month, while the pro option is $499/first year then $9/month. Part of the funding will go to augment this platform, too, the company says.