The service has been likened to that of the Twitter platform. Nicknamed “Bubbly,” the Bubble Motion service is often described as a Twitter-like social networking service, but instead it has voice-based communication service. The Singapore-based service currently services over 7 million users in India and Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan. To date, Bubble Motion’s Bubbly has over 250 million messages that have been delivered through its “bubble.”
The company’s dual offices in Palo Alto, CA and Singapore has over 45 full-time employees, 30 of which are based in Singapore.
To further grow the company and to heighten its visibility in the industry, the voice-based social platform developers raised over $10 million in capital funding, led primarily by a group called SingTel Innov8. Other investors in the project included Infocomm Investments, Palomar Ventures, NGC and Sequoia Capital. According to the company’s CEO, Thomas Clayton, the new funds will be used for company expansion and a continued scaling of its current platform.
Mr. Clayton stated that the company wanted to initially raise between $1-3 million to bridge working capital, however, the company’s growth was much faster than had been anticipated, therefore a larger funding amount was needed and the deals investors were ideal for the company’s business future.
The target market for the service has shifted slightly from celebrities and entertainers, and focusing now more on peer-to-peer clusters. Although celebrities are still a part of the majority audience, the viral magnetism of the service lies with ordinary users who want to share their 3-second thoughts with friends and social network connections.
Teens and young adults are some of the service’s frequent users who prefer to send photos and text/audio messages in lieu of making live phone calls. The gravitational preference of this application is what makes the service similar to Twitter, but because the service has been used by celebrities its popularity is famous within many online social circles.