May 2nd, 2008Montreal’s OZ lands 10M from Wellington Financial
OZ and Wellington Financial announced today that they closed a 10M venture financing round for the mobile company. OZ is a 5 year old mobile “consumer messaging” company headquartered in Montreal
OZ builds cross-device client applications for mobiles that allow operators and device makers to package up popular messaging and social services (like IM, flickr, myspace) through a slick app that runs natively on the a variety of devices.
That OZ were able to raise 10M in debt financing speaks to traction the company has been earning with their industry partners and to the confidence of Wellington in their future revenue streams. That 10M and the fact the fact that are able to create such value as essentialy a middle-ware services also speaks to the capital intensive nature and ongoing challenge of translating any kind of online experience across the heavily fragmented world of devices.
It seems to us that a number Canadian successful stories in mobile, like OZ, are often are not widely recognized. Canadian mobile entrepreneurs have a tendency to be B2B stories, quietly making money selling through or to the traditional carrier value chain. Not many Canadian mobile consumer brands come to mind. Even RIM who everybody knows does sell only through carrier partners.
Very recently however, the possibility of a real Canadian mobile content market is starting to emerge with new entrants, more open smart(er) phones and data rates beginning to approach sanity. WirelessNorth.ca is interested to see if the balance in strategy shifts. Will the likes of OZ, or Viigo, and/or the next wave of mobile entrepreneurs continue to focus on making or powering the carrier deck. Or will they step in to the limelight in their own right?
