VoodooVox Raises $8.1 Million In 4th Round Funding, Led By Softbank

VoodooVox, a developer of in-call advertising services, has raised $8.1 million in 4th round financing. The round was led by Softbank Capital and also included previous investors Apax Partners, Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, and Village Ventures. VoodooVox claims that its media marketing services, which get inserted into voice-based applications (most commonly voice calls), cover a network of 300 million calls per month. Some of the clients using the service are IDT, Virgin Mobile, Univision, Nokia, Microsoft and Showtime. release

VoodooVox essentially works like a company serving ads to web sites: it gets revenue from companies wanting to advertise in its network of voice calls, and it pays voice “publishers”, which make up that network, a fee to place ads into their call streams. Steve Murray, a partner at Softbank Capital who is joining the board of VoodooVox with the latest funding round, says that the company today concentrates mainly on directory assistance applications but plans to extend the application to cover mobile voice calls, traffic sent via call centers, “and the thousands of new audio-based web widgets that are very popular with the explosive growth of social networks”.