Jamba in the Americas?

Filed in archive Venture Capital on September 10, 2004

Yes Jamba the symbol of a successful working exit strategy has not been the only one in the world. Fabrice Grinda founder of Aucland has been setting up Zingy here in NYC and has recently followed the Samwer brothers (whoch had a 20% stake in the company, too) and exited to for-side.com for a rumored amount of USD 100+ million.

Paidcontent.org was running a story about it some weeks ago:

"Zingy.com: Revenues: 2003 revenue: $4.8 million. Expected revenue for 2004: $20 million. The company currently claims to have 20 percent of the rigntone market and expects it to grow to 40 percent by 2007.
Zingy is one of the oldest and biggest ringtones vendors in U.S., and perhaps the one with the most brand-name recognition among all vendors. Meanwhile Vindigo is a very New York-kind of company, which rose when Silicon Alley (and PDAs) was hot, and has been through a lot, trying to change its whole business model from the unconnected PDAs to the connected cellphones.
For-Side.com is a public company in Japan, traded on Jasdaq...earlier this week, it also announced an investment in UK-based mobile content company iTouchPlc...
The For-Side empire is illustrated in this company presentation (the image on the right). This is the second major Japanese company spreading its wings stateside and in Europe in the mobile content sector. Index Corp, another Japanese biggie, bought out U.S. company Mobliss earlier this year, along with two other French companies."

The best - Zingy did not rely on any VC investments and made its way based on own revenues. Congrats Fabrice!