Vonage raises $35 million
The Internet telephone service provider announces a $35 million investment earmarked for expansion plans.
Chief Financial Officer John Rego said Vonage will use some of the funding to expand into Europe. Vonage also plans to reach all 50 states and more of Canada by next year. If all goes well, Rego said he expects the company to become profitable by mid-2004.
The funding round's single biggest contributor is New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a $5 billion technology and health care venture capital company. Vonage is NEA's first Internet phone company investment.
Get Up to Speed on... VoIP Get the latest headlines and company-specific news in our expanded GUTS section. | ||||
The investment is further sign of the growing importance of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology for making phone calls using the Internet Protocol, the world's most popular method for sending data from one computer to another. VoIP requires a network connection and a PC with a speaker and a microphone, or a device to convert a telephone's analog signal into IP and vice versa.
After years of over promising and under delivering, VoIP is generating significant interest among telecom carriers, corporations and consumers, thanks to significant improvements in quality of service.
Vonage, with 71,000 subscribers, gained a national reputation after