Boku Blog

Archive for January, 2010

BOKU is excited to announce a new round of funding and the launch of Paymo!

January 19, 2010

Today is a great day for BOKU, and we’re excited to share our announcements with the everyone. The first piece of news to share is a new round of funding for BOKU. We received $25 million in a round led by DAG Ventures with participation from Benchmark Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Index Ventures. We’ll use the funding to expand into new markets, add redundancy to our systems, and continue to refine and improve our security and fraud prevention systems. We’re incredibly pleased and flattered by this vote of confidence from our investors - it’s both gratifying and a great way to start 2010.

Our second big piece of news is the introduction of our consumer-facing brand, Paymo. While we love the BOKU brand, after exhaustive and global testing we’ve determined that Paymo is a universally understandable brand, irrespective of culture, language, or background that resonates with consumers. So the Paymo brand is what customers will see when they checkout online using their mobile phones.

We’ve had a whirlwind experience as a company with a lot of exciting activity since our launch in June 2009 (only seven months ago!) Today is another thrilling milestone in an exciting tenure as a growing, active company.

We’ve also received a warm reception from bloggers, writers, and pundits in the online and traditional press, who have been spreading the word today. The list of who covered our news is below, and we’ll keep adding to it as we see more stories come out.

Thanks to our customers, our partners, and our investors for all your support and confidence. 2010 is going to be an exciting year!
-The BOKU Team

•    All Things D
•    MSN Money
•    TechCrunch
•    VentureBeat
•    Moco News
•    Washington Post
•    Silicon Alley Insider
•    Virtual Goods News
•    Payments News
•    Paid Content
•    Inside Social Games
•    Alt Assets
•    Wireless Week
•    Fierce Mobile Content
•    Nonstop Tech News
•    Telecom Paper
•    SF Business Times
•    Digital Media Wire
•    THE Paypers
•    Strategy Eye

Posted by bokunews | Announcements, Mobile Payments

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Mobile Donation to Haiti

January 14, 2010

Many of you are aware of the tragic 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday.  The impacts to this already impoverished nation are staggering and help of any kind is being sought.  We wanted to let you know of a program where mobile payments can be used for donations and we’re reaching out to friends and partners to ask folks to donate to the American Red Cross Relief for Haiti via texting “HAITI” to 90999.

This will work similar to mobile payments in that $10 will show up on your mobile phone bill. Mobile donations have *no* carrier fees.   BOKU is not the provider of this service, we just want to get the message out about this opportunity to help.

More details can be found here:

http://newsroom.redcross.org/2010/01/12/disaster-alert-earthquake-in-haiti/

and here:

http://www.redcross.org/en/

Thanks,
The BOKU Team

Posted by Ron | Mobile Payments, security

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