Cross-messaging platform Plustxt raises funding from Mumbai Angels, others

Bangalore-based Plustxt Mobile Solutions Pvt Ltd, which offers a text messaging platform that enables a sender to translate text to the language of the recipient, has raised an undisclosed sum from Mumbai Angels and InMobi co-founder Amit Gupta.

Plustxt founder Pratyush Prasanna told Techcircle.in, that Kishore Warrier, an Ahmedabad-based investor and entrepreneur and CEO of Mednova Consulting, and Amit Mittal, vice president of Startup Business Group at Microsoft, also participated in the round.

"The money we have raised from these investors will be used for product development, marketing & advertising and hiring new talents," Prasanna, an alumnus of IIM Calcutta, informed.

Set up in 2012 by IIT Bombay graduate Lokesh Chauhan, IIT Delhi alumnus Parag Arora, along with Prasanna, Plustxt is available on iPhone and Android OS-powered devices including tablets. The service will be extended to BlackBerry, Windows and Java phones soon.

The Plustxt messaging platform provides full control to the sender over the text he/she sends. That is, the sender can decide whether the recipient can/cannot copy or forward the text to others. For example, the sender can '+delete' the text he/she sent to make sure that the recipient does not access the message.

If the sender uses '+delete' before the recipient reads it, the recipient cannot see or access the text (something similar to Gmail). Moreover, the message character limit is not constrained to 160, but can go up to 1,000 allowing users to send much larger texts.

In January this year, the company had launched services in Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati, according to a top executive of the company.

The Bangalore-based startup, which also offers privacy controls such as complete recall and access to sent messages, is also planning to launch the service in Arabic, Bahasa and Thai languages. The company recently graduated from the Microsoft Acceleration programme.