San Francisco-based mobile start-up Nextbit Systems has closed $18 million in Series A funding. Accel Partners and Google Ventures led the round. Also, as a result of the transaction, Google Ventures’ Rich Miner and Accel’s Rich Wong are joining Nextbit’s board of directors.
PRESS RELEASE
San Francisco based start-up Nextbit Systems Inc. announced today that it has raised $18 Million in series A funding, led by Accel Partners and Google Ventures. As part of the fundraising, Nextbit will add Rich Miner and Rich Wong to its board of directors.
General Partner Rich Miner is the mobile lead at Google Ventures and was previously a co-founder of Android. Rich Wong is the lead mobile partner at Accel Partners, and has invested in companies such as Angry Birds developer Rovio, AdMob (acquired by Google), 3LM (acquired by Motorola Mobility) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter).
The founders of Nextbit are Tom Moss and Mike Chan, both EIRs at Accel Partners. Previously, Tom was co-founder and CEO of Three Laws Mobility Inc. (3LM), which was acquired by Motorola Mobility Inc. Prior to 3LM, Tom was an executive on the Android team at Google. At Google, Tom served as Worldwide Head of Business Development and Partnerships for Android, and also spent 10 months in Japan as General Manager of Android Japan and Asia-Pacific.
Mike Chan was the first employee and led all platform and client development at 3LM, which consisted of core system and framework enhancements to Android for the enterprise. Prior to 3LM, Mike was on the Android team where he led Power Management. Mike and Tom each received a Founder’s Award at Google for their work on Android.
Nextbit has not released any information regarding its product plans, but has made public that the team includes engineers from Google’s Android team, Apple’s iOS team, Dropbox, and Amazon’s AWS team.
Google’s Rich Miner stated that “What got me interested in Nextbit right away was the quality of the team and their ambition for the product. I have known the founders and many of the engineers since the early days of Android, and if there is any team that can pull off such an ambitious vision, it’s this team.”
Accel’s Rich Wong stated that “What excites me is that the Nextbit team is taking a BIG swing at solving some of the fundamental issues in mobile computing. When Tom and Mike first told me about what they planned to do and the quality of team they were putting together, I immediately wanted to get involved. Companies like Nextbit are the reasons I came into VC, to work on companies taking an ambitious, huge swing in arguably the most important technology wave at our time (mobile computing).”
Nextbit is currently hiring engineers for its San Francisco office. More information is available at www.nextbit.com/jobs.
