Foundry Group Invests in Urban Airship

We recently led the $5.4 million Series B funding round of Urban Airship. Besides our normal excitement of finding another great company to partner with, we are especially pleased to announce this as our first investment in our second fund.

Launched in June 2009, Urban Airship has found early success providing mobile developers with tools to optimize their applications, including easy-to-implement products for mobile messaging and content delivery and authorization. To date, Urban Airship has delivered more than 1 billion mobile messages across the Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. Many of the top brands in entertainment, media, publishing and gaming depend on Urban Airship to ensure their mobile marketing initiatives are profitable and scalable.

Urban Airship’s line of real-time messaging products, AirMail, helps businesses significantly increase user engagement with their brand and deliver more value to users by delivering push notifications. AirMail has been big business for Urban Airship since it gained early market traction by powering push notifications for Tapulous’ runaway hit app, Tap Tap Revenge, the first app in Apple’s App Store to be enabled with push. Since then, the company has helped popular mobile app publishers such as Universal Entertainment Group, Dictionary.com, LivingSocial, and Gowalla find success — and increase revenue — from their mobile apps. Most recently, Verizon Wireless named Urban Airship its preferred provider of push notifications across the entire Verizon developer network.

Urban Airship’s in-app purchase product, StoreFront, provides users with easy one-click purchases through Apple’s iTunes, thus opening up a new mobile channel for selling existing content. StoreFront also includes functionality to enable subscriptions through the iTunes interface, a much-needed solution to publisher challenges in managing and authenticating user devices for ongoing content access.

Urban Airship reminds us a lot of what we love about our previous investment in SendGrid, (but for the mobile ecosystem) sprinkled with some of our latest theme Distribution which is epitomized by our investment in BigDoor.

The company is located in Portland, OR which is a new geography for us, but with familiar and well-respected partner True Ventures, whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with on several other companies.