Bluedot moves into US with $2.5m funding round

Australian startup to keep HQ in Melbourne

Bluedot co-founder Filip Eldic (right) says the startup has found a way to accurately determine the location of a user's smartphone without killing the battery. Credit: Bluedot

Bluedot co-founder Filip Eldic (right) says the startup has found a way to accurately determine the location of a user's smartphone without killing the battery. Credit: Bluedot

Australian startup Bluedot is expanding into the US after raising $2.5 million in its latest funding round.

The Melbourne-based startup, profiled last year in Techworld Australia, sells a patented SDK for geolocation that can obtain the precise location of a person’s smartphone for payments without the battery drain usually associated with GPS use.

Bluedot will be setting up a US office in San Francisco over the next two to six months, and is currently recruiting sales and marketing staff in San Francisco, according to co-founder Filip Eldic. Bluedot CFO David Jaques, who was the founding CFO of PayPal, is based in San Francisco.

Bluedot is also hiring technical staff for its Melbourne headquarters.

“Our intention is to keep our engineering base here in Melbourne,” Eldic told Computerworld Australia.

Bluedot has about 200 developers using the SDK for their apps, including enterprises, freelance developers and digital agencies, said Eldic. The company has a freemium pricing model in which it does not charge for the SDK until a developer customer’s app becomes popular.

American entrepreneur Jeffrey Katz contributed about $2.3 million to the $2.5 million funding round. Katz is the founder of Mercury Payments and an investor in Cardfree. Angel investors from the US and Australia also contributed to the round.

“When I first saw Bluedot pitch at a UniSA Centre for Business Growth event, I was blown away by the huge potential of their technology, and impressed with the ability of their team to execute,” said Katz.

The round valued Bluedot at $11.5 million and brings total funds raised by the company to date to $3.6 million.

Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia

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Tags mobileBatteryGPSstartupslocation based servicesfundingBluedot

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