Flurry, offering free email for your phone, raises $3.5M
Flurry, a San Francisco company that offers an easy download for your mobile phone to let you email and read news for free, has raised $3.5 million in a first round of financing.
Flurry is useful because it helps you get email without having to buy an expensive smartphone. It lets you read news via RSS.
Now it hits crunch time. After signing up 140,000 users over the past year (we don’t know how many of them are active), it is about to start rolling out advertising to pay for the free service.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round, and was joined by Draper Richards and previous investor Borealis Ventures. Here’s the announcement.
More on how Flurry works here. It is a Java client download. You can sync your contacts on your phone. You manage your account on your PC or with your phone’s Web browser.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
