Investment Round: Frontline Ventures, SnapRoute, TravelTriangle and Inmoji

Funding rounds and investment arent just the lifeblood that keeps technology firms alive and growing. Theyre also fantastic indicators of which ideas and technologies are catching the interest of the business world and have the potential to impact the mobile marketing industry as a whole.

Investment Round is our weekly update on which firms have secured new funding, which areas are seeing the most financing, and who is putting up the cash that enables these firms to pushing the capabilities of mobile marketing further.

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Frontline Ventures Raises €60m to Back B2B Firms
Early-stage venture capital firm Frontline Ventures has secured a new €60m (£51.2m) fund that it will use to invest in companies producing B2B software at both pre-seed and seed stages.

Frontline, which has offices in Dublin and London, targets companies across Europe, and will be making investments ranging from €200,000 to €3m as it seeks to finance B2B companies at both the application and infrastructure levels.

“The pace at which software companies are redefining industries is accelerating,” said Will Prendergast, partner at Frontline Ventures. “Our first fund has shown us that some of the worlds most ambtious founders are right here. With this Fund II, Frontline is positioned to be the investment partner of choice for ambitious software entrepreneurs building out from Europe to the US.”

Frontlines first €50m fund has been invested in 27 companies across Europe including Logentries, which was acquired by Rapid7, Ochestrate.io, acquired by CenturyLink, Qstream, CurrencyFair and StreetTeam.

Open Source Network OS Secures $25m
SnapRoute, a startup which specialises in building open source software for network engineers, has announced a $25m (£20.2m) investment round, led by Norwest Venture Partners.

SnapRoutes technology enables engineers to customise commodity networking switches and routers to meet their precise needs, resulting in improved efficiency and reduced chances of failures. The company was founded by former Apple employee Jason Forrester, who found that as data centres reach larger and larger scales, the underlying network hardware can act in unpredictable ways if not exactly tailored to a firms needs.

The new funding, which also came from AT&T, Lightspeed and Microsoft Ventures, will enable the company to expand its team, which currently stands at around 35 employees, and strengthen its offering as it seeks big name customers. Rama Sekhar of Norwest will join the firms board of directors to offer guidance as the company grows.

TravelTriangle Closes $10m to Bring Indian Travel Online
Indian startup TravelTriangle acts as a marketplace for finding and booking travel and holidays online, and is focused on disrupting the countrys largely offline travel agency industry, which is dominated by small- and medium-sized firms when it comes to online access.

The company has just ended a $10m Series B round of funding, led by Singapore-based RB Investments and with participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, who led the pre-Series A funding in 2014 and Series A round in 2015 respectively.

As well as acting as a lead generator for Indias travel agencies, TravelTriangle also works with them to trailor trips to consumers specific needs. With a population of 1.2bn that is going online with increasing speed, Indias travel market is ripe for disruption, and TravelTriangle is set to take advantage of what is expected to be a $20bn market by 2020.

Inmoji Raises $1.5m for Emoji Marketing
Emoji-centred marketing startup Inmoji has just raised an additional $1.5m to power its recently-announced self-serve platform, which will enable a broader range of businesses to access its emoji campaigns. The $1.5m round brings the companys total funding to $9.5m, with $5m invested during its first round last March.

According to Michael Africk, CEO of Inmoji, there has been a “gold rush” over the past few years of companies moving into branded emojis, with social media platforms beginning to get in on the game themselves. However, Inmoji aims to distinguish itself by collaborating directly with marketers to meet their goals with interactive emojis that can link to additional functions.

“Inmojis goal is to harness the power of messaging to connect people with the brands they love,” said Michael Africk, co-founder and CEO of Inmoji. “This capital gives us additional resources to expand quickly and strategically into new markets, innovate rapidly and deliver on our vision around the world.”