Txteagle, a US-based company that enables people to do surveys from their mobile phones in emerging markets, has raised $8.5m in its series A round from a consortium including computer equipment company Qualcomm’s corporate venturing unit.
Txteagle has deals with 220 phone carriers in nearly 100 countries and so has 2.1 billion consumers in its database.
Venture capital (VC) firm Spark Capital led the A round as a new investor in Txteagle, and was joined by RBC Venture Partners, which was part of Royal Bank of Canada and manages the Blackberry Partners Fund; VC peer Flywheel Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. RBC, Flywheel and Qualcomm Ventures had been seed-stage investors in Txteagle.
The portfolio company had been a previous winner of Qualcomm Ventures’ QPrize.
This year, the overall winner of QPrize was Enterproid, a US company, which took top honours against competition from five other regional winners representing Europe, China, Korea, Israel and India.
The company previously won QPrize’s North America regional competition and was awarded $100,000 in venture financing and will receive an additional $150,000 in convertible note funding from Qualcomm.
Nagraj Kashyap, vice-president of Qualcomm Ventures, said: "This year’s QPrize finalists demonstrated convincingly that the future of mobile entrepreneurship is not rooted in any specific country or region – it is worldwide.
"We congratulate Enterproid on their exceptional achievement and look forward to helping them expand their business opportunities and market presence. We also want to congratulate the five other regional winners – Cambridge Temperature Concepts, Corrigon, Ji Ke, Kiwiple and Reverie Language Technologies – who have each received $100,000 (€100,000 in Europe) in venture financing from Qualcomm."