EFI buys out Unimobile for $2.5 m

BANGALORE: Unimobile Inc., a wireless messaging startup once hailed as hot in

its birthplace India, said on Thursday it had sold itself to US printing

technology firm Electronics for Imaging in order to survive.






At $2.5 million for the all-cash deal, it was a come-down for Unimobile, which
was born in 1996 as Gray Cell and later incorporated in the Silicon Valley after

a round of high-profile funding in excess of $6 million.

But its chairman and CEO said the deal opened the way for a new future for
Unimobile, which would become a unit of EFI. "Given that the financial

environment is so weak for us, it was important that we got funded and live to

fight another day," Vasudev Bhandarkar told Reuters.






In its new avatar, Unimobile will get fresh funds and help drive the expansion
of EFI, which Bhandarkar said had been drawn by Unimobile's ability to help

people use mobile phones to direct documents to nearby printers on EFI's PrintMe

network technology.

Unimobile was considered a promising prospect in tying telecoms to the

Internet, after the success of Indian-born Sabeer Bhatia's Hotmail e-mail

service acquired by Microsoft

Gray Cell had received venture funds from big names like Finnish telecoms

group Sonera, Walden International and Draper, but found itself struggling as

its dream of becoming a wireless Internet brand crashed with falling dotcoms.






It switched from a consumer Internet focus to become a creator of back-end
wireless technologies for companies, and counts among its customers firms like

Hewlett-Packard Co, ABN Amro and Britain's Virgin Mobile.






Rajesh Reddy, a technology whizkid and the key founder of Unimobile, left the
firm last year to start a new venture. Bhandarkar said the company, with 28 of

its 45 employees in India and most others in the United States, now had "a

new lease of life" and looked forward to boosting business in Asia-Pacific

and developing and supporting technologies from Bangalore.