Thursday, August 21, 2008

MoFuse plugs into seed funds from Slater

The Slater Technology Fund reports that it has provided the seed investment to MoFuse Inc., a year-old startup designed to enable bloggers to publish their content to the mobile web.

Providence, R.I.-based MoFuse (a contraction of the words mobile fusion) developed technology designed to enable users to create a mobile website in minutes.

The company was founded in August 2007 and released its first technology product to the public on Nov. 1, 2007. By the end of the year, MoFuse had 2,200 mobile sites in its network, company officials said. To date, the MoFuse network claims nearly 12,000 sites, making it the fastest-growing mobile site publishing network in the world.

The Slater Technology Fund is a Rhode Island-based early-stage fund that is backed by the state of Rhode Island. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Thorne Sparkman, managing director of Slater, said MoFuse’s technology enables a large, global publishing population to integrate with the mobile channel. Since January, the company has increased its website portfolio by 240 percent and the number of page views by more than 935 percent, company officials said.

The Slater Technology Fund typically invests at the inception stage in the development of a new venture. In June, it made a $500,000 financing commitment ProThera Biologics Inc., a biotechnology firm based in East Providence, R.I.