Waterloo based Kik Interactive has raised $19.5 million to further develop and help monetize its mobile messaging platform.
The Series B investment round, announced Monday comes from Foundation Capital, along with Kik’s initial investors RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. The company also announced the addition of Anamitra Banerji, a partner at Foundation Captial to its board of directors.
Banerji is a former product manager at Twitter, who was responsible for developing and introducing promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik told TechCrunch that the company chose Foundation Capital because of its strengths in the field of monetization.
“What’s great about Foundation is that obviously it’s a great firm, and a lot of those involved have been entrepreneurs, and they’ve done like Chegg, Netflix and Pocket,” Livingston told TechCrunch. “But Anamitra [Banerji] who handled this investment and just became a partner, was employee number 30 at Twitter, first product manager and created and drove all their monetization. So he’s basically the perfect guy for what we want to do.”
Kik’s smartphone messaging platform has been growing steadily since it was launched in by team of students at the University of Waterloo, in October 2010. It recently surpassed 50 million users and is adding 200,000 new users each day.
In March 2011, the then 23 year old Livingston donated $1 million to UW’s VeloCity incubator program to fund student ventures. The program provides ventures with $25,000, four months of office space, incorporation services and mentoring.
