Long Live The (Hybrid) Mobile Web: HTML5 Specialist Netbiscuits Raises $27M Led By Stripes Group

Netbiscuits, the mobile development platform that has worked with the likes of eBay, Google, Coca-Cola and 15,000 other developers on their mobile web services, is ramping up its game as smartphone usage continues to accelerate worldwide. The company today is announcing that it has raised $27 million in a Series C round. This also marks the first time that Netbiscuits, which says it hosts over 110,000 mobile web apps and sites, has disclosed the value of a raise since first opening for business in 2000. This latest investment was led by new investor Stripes Group, and also had participation from existing investors T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom’s VC arm) and?Creathor. Co-founder and CEO?Michael Neidhoefer tells TechCrunch that the investment is a sign of the “tipping point” that we are now seeing in mobile web usage, and how companies like his are taking investment now to meet that opportunity: “Mobile phones are in many places outselling PCs,” he notes. But with the market still showing little sign of consolidation, companies are investing to build their own businesses to grow organically. “We will be using this to invest in sales, marketing and R&D, but acquisitions are not part of our strategy.” In addition to working with brands on their B2C offerings, Netbiscuits also provides a platform for B2B enterprise mobility services. Because of Netbiscuits’ legacy — it was founded in 2000, when WAP was often still the only game in town — it has a strong tie to offering development, publishing and monetizing services on mobile web sites. Neidhoefer says that this is still the case today, as usage moves away from feature devices and on to tablets and smartphones. Although Netbiscuits was founded in Germany, Neidhoefer says that more than 50% of its business is currently in North America, with Europe a strong number two and the followed by Asia Pacific and Latin America. That also translates to a stronger market for smartphone-based applications. And while there is some evidence that app usage is pulling away from mobile web as the main way that people access content on those handheld devices, Neidhoefer says that in fact a lot of those native apps — especially on Android — are just HTML5 in native wrappers. And that is only becoming more common. “Native apps can be hard to maintain and expensive,” he says. “So there is a need to move to HTML5. Over the next

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