Kik, the popular messaging that just surpassed 50 million users, has announced a Series B funding raise of $19.5 million, bringing on board Twitter veteran Anamitra Banerji to advise the company.
Kik’s amazing growth of 200,000 users per day has been galvanized by the introduction of Cards, a series of HTML5 mini apps that are accessed within the native Kik apps on Android and iOS. Their success has come from seamless integration with the one-to-one experience and the potential to expand in-message content beyond mere text and photos. Cards vary from simple multiplayer games, where users can compete on scores, to, in the latest version, a meme generator.
The Series B round is lead by Foundation Capital, but is buttressed by initial investors RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Kik will use the money to invest in its Cards platform as a way to monetize the potentially-lucrative foray into messaging-based applications. Companies like Kakao Talk and Line have already proved that platforms built on messaging apps can be huge moneymakers, and the market is relatively untapped in North America.
Kik’s CEO, Ted Livingston, says that despite WhatsApp’s apparent dominance in the market, the Waterloo-based company is in a better position to eke profits out of the low-margin industry. That potential outward growth, beyond just messaging, is why Kik has kept to iterating just two versions, its iOS and Android apps. When I asked the company’s VP of marketing why they haven’t updated their Windows Phone app in over a year, she said it was because the pickup has been comparatively low, and it would be difficult to successfully integrate the Cards platform into it without risking the performance on the other operating systems.
The company has reportedly been approached by a number of gaming companies to facilitate integration into the app, though it’s uncertain whether the games will be played within the app or, like Facebook, will be a conduit to download others.
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