Mobstac Close To Raising Funding From Accel Partners

Bangalore-based mobile website developer Mobile Motion (Mobstac) is on its way to closing its first round of venture capital funding from Accel Partners, according to sources close to the development.

Last year, it had raised angel funding from a fellow alumnus of IIT Madras and a successful entrepreneur from the Valley.

Mobstac's co-founder and CEO Sharat Potharaju and Accel Partner MD Prashanth Prakash were unavailable for comment.

Mobstac allows website owners (publishers) to create mobile friendly sites and monetise them. Publishers can log into their Mobstac account and design and configure their mobile site. They can also select different themes for their mobile site and manage various features such as comments, social media sharing, SEO (search engine optimisation) and advertising using the dashboard. It also allows you to include ads from Google AdSense, InMobi, and AdMob on your mobile site. It also allows publishers to set up a custom Google search, Twitter feeds for their mobile site, YouTube channels and comments powered by Disqus.

Its clients include Techcrunch.com, The Hindu (m.thehindu.com) and MDhil.com, a healthcare information portal. Though India has almost 800 million mobile users today, development of mobile websites is still a fragmented market and typically an in-house project.

Recently, Accel Partners, along with Tiger Global, invested $2.5 million in Babyoye.com, an online shop for new parents. Accel also recently invested in e-commerce portal LetsBuy.com. Previous investments include Flipkart Online Services Pvt Ltd, Exclusively.in Inc, Chakpak Media Pvt Ltd, Myntra Designs Pvt Ltd and voice SMS service Kirusa Inc.

Mobstac was launched in June 2009 by Sharat Potharaju and Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty (CTO at Mobstac). Potharaju has held varied roles, from heading marketing and communications at NGO Janaagraha Center for Citizenship and Democracy to investment banking at Merrill Lynch in its New York headquarters and venture capitalism at Duke University. He is a post graduate from Duke University and an IIT- Madras graduate.

Prior to setting up Mobile Motion, Maddimsetty was a software products manager at US based Hillcrest Laboratories, a digital entertainment devices firm. He was employed at Morgan Stanley for a year, responsible for supporting the securitized product group's trading desk. He has a Masters in computer science and engineering from Washington University in St. Louis and is an IIT-Madras graduate. There's an interesting post by Maddimsetty - How We Raised Angel Funding in India for MobStac.

With its Basic service, Mobstac offers its own analytics, ad network integration, design options and support for 5000 different mobile devices. Mobstac recently launched a premium plan called MobStac Pro.

The Pro version costs $19 per month and offers extra features such as customised ads, analytics and management of multiple mobile sites from a single account. It also plans to create mobile versions of websites running on Drupal and Joomla. It already supports CMS for Wordpress and Blogger sites. It also has an enterprise service in which it includes enterprise ad server integration.

Last month, the company relaunched its website to make it a self-service platform and also shifted to a new office.