SingTel's venture capital arm splurges on a Cayman-based company

Guess how much SingTel Innov8 invested in General Mobile to reach out to the emerging market mobile users?

In a release, General Mobile Corporation (General Mobile), a Cayman-based company, announced that it has secured US$5million in funding from SingTel Innov8 (Innov8), the wholly-owned corporate venture arm of the SingTel Group, and Mitsui & Co. (Mitsui). General Mobile plans to use the proceeds to expand and fund future growth in the fast growing mobile internet business in the emerging markets.

Founded in 2011, General Mobile is dedicated to providing mobile internet service to emerging markets with its proprietary content management and application store hosting platform. The strong growth in mobile phone sales and mobile phone users have led to increased demand for mobile applications, content and services over the last few years in the emerging markets. But these users have often been underserved due to technology limitations and fragmentation in the supply chain in these markets. Through General Mobile's platform and partnership with handset manufacturers, handset brands and mobile content providers, it provides a one-stop mobile internet service offering for emerging market mobile phone users with the application store and applications to meet the users' needs.

With this round of investment, Innov8 and Mitsui join existing investors such as Taiwan-based MediaTek Inc., the leading mobile chipset and platform provider. Innov8 is backed by the SingTel Group which has 445 million mobile customers in countries such as Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Africa. Mitsui is one of the largest and most reputable companies in Japan with worldwide business coverage, including IT & mobile related businesses such as IT channels, digital content, electronic payments, etc.

"The opportunities are huge and close cooperation among all players from the value chain is key to successfully running a mobile internet business in the emerging markets," said Mr. Paul Wu, CEO of General Mobile. "At General Mobile, our mission is to provide a one-stop service by integrating all key elements required to run the business from devices, platforms, telecom operators, content providers, and channels. With this round of investment, we have on board world-class strategic partners across all the fields to help accelerate our worldwide service deployment as well as enabling us to provide a more complete set of services and solutions."

CEO of Innov8, Mr Edgar Hardless, said, "General Mobile's solution addresses the strong demands for mobile application and services seen by emerging market mobile users across our footprint. We look forward to working with the company to build and expand on their success to date."