Messaging pioneer Jongla today announced that the company has secured €5 million in a Series B investment round. This makes a total of €12 million that it has secured to date.
Investors in this new round include Arto Boman, Henry Sjöman, Matti Kallio, Gustav Nyberg, Kristian Pentti, Circlion Capital Oy, Kontino Invest Oy, Takoa Invest Oy, Ingman Finance Oy and JSH Capital Oy.
The Finnish company says it will continue to scale the business globally and continue to innovate with new features and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
“Messaging apps are the new ecosystem for the next generation of apps and services. Our team of investors have seen first hand the positive direction the messaging business is heading in and they want to enable the next chapter of the Jongla story”, says Jongla founder and investor Arto Boman. “With the new capital and through new strategic partnerships, our aim is to further leverage AI and bots that we believe will revolutionise messaging between businesses and consumers.”
It is not just bots Jongla is considering. The company has set plans to further strengthen its position as the go-to messaging app for emerging markets. By 2020 there will be 6 billion smartphone users worldwide as the people in new markets access the mobile Internet and adopt messaging through apps. Jongla plans to take advantage of this opportunity with their accessible and social apps.
“We have seen rapid growth this year, driven by the demand for light and social apps in emerging markets”, says Riku Salminen, CEO of Jongla. “This Autumn alone, our users have sent three times the amount of messages – the uplift has been huge. Among our top countries are now Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, India and Indonesia – all emerging markets, which alone cover 2 billion of total population.”
Jongla is proud to soon release their second app. They have yet to disclose the new app’s functionality in detail but it will centre on voice dictation and smart audio processing. These are themes that the company has been working across on several fronts already. “We see natural voice recognition and audio processing as crucial for the future of messaging”, continued Salminen. “Our second app will do something that no other app has done before, so we’re super excited about its release in early 2017.”
Earlier this year, Jongla announced the launch of Jongla Social Messenger, the most significant upgrade to the app to date. With social features added like the ability to discover new and interesting people around you, the new Jongla has been designed to bridge the gap between social networks and messaging.
Also this year Jongla officially rolled out across Africa. Like the success experienced in Asia, Jongla is growing fast in Africa by allowing people to message better and save money and data with the world’s lightest messenger.
Jongla is available to download for free from the App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store.
