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Mobile search engine startup gets venture fund

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CIOL Bureau
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MUMBAI, INDIA: Mobile search engine startup, Innoz Technologies, has received investment from Seedfund Advisors.

As per the agreement, Seedfund will hold a significant minority stake in the company. The amount of investment has not been disclosed.

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Founded in 2008, Innoz was launched by Kerala-based Deepak R, Abhinav Sree, Ashwin Nath and M Hisamuddin during their college days. Since then, the company's flagship product — mobile search engine on short code 55444 — has been quite popular among mobile users, mainly among those who do not have Internet access on their handset. The product has now crossed one million SMS searches a day and has partnered with mobile service providers, such as Airtel, Vodafone , Aircel, Tata Docomo and Idea. 

               Also read: IT startup to get non-stop traffic to your site

With this investment from Seedfund, Innoz is planning to further innovate its product and strengthen the technology base to support the increasing demand and traffic. The company will use the funds to create a unique identity for '55444' as the best place to find information on mobile.

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“It may seem counter-intuitive, but we feel there’s a huge opportunity in offering information and services to the feature phone market which has over half a billion users in India alone, and more in other parts of the world,” Mahesh Murthy, Seedfund Advisors' managing partner said.

“The beauty of 55444’s model is that every single search is paid for, monetization is instant, and loyalty is growing. Even with the spread of the mobile Internet, we believe there will be a continuing role for the sheer convenience of using SMS for information rather than fiddling around for browsers, connectivity and search boxes,” Murthy added.

Seedfund Advisors believe that Innoz squarely falls into their vision of 'helping build out the new India'. Continued Murthy, “We look forward to working with Innoz to help 55444 become an even deeper part of the 'aam aadmi’s' life.”

Innoz currently attends over 35 million queries a month from Indian users, and is growing at around 1,000 per cent a year. It claims to be the largest search engine on mobile feature phones in India and aims to become the Google of the mobile search.