Akoha gets $1.9 million angel investing

By Heri Apr 28th 2008 in Finance

Akoha has announced this morning $1.9 million in funding from various angel investors. The list of investors include David Chamandy (Lavalife), John Bromley, JS Cournoyer, Ron Dembo (Zerofootprint.net), Jake Eberts (film producer), Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Ventures, Games for Change), John Meeks, Reg Weiser, Jonathan Wener, Rober Montgomery (Achilles Media), Chris Emergui (BAM Strategy), and Montreal Start Up.

The funds are supporting ungoing development and launch of Akoha.

The news has been picked by many blogs, in Techcrunch, StartupNorth, Techvibes, and mashable

What’s curious is that the startup got featured on those high-profile blogs even though noone was able to tell what exactly Akoha was doing — it probably has a lot to do more with Austin Hill’s profile than the product. The funniest on the blog coverage was Fagstein’s post:

… It could be a social-networking site for fundraisers or it could be a giant multiplayer Pong game with the Sesame Street theme playing all the time. They’re still kind of being coy about it …

Of course, it’s due to the fact that Akoha is still under development. I can’t myself tell you more what Akoha is doing – other than they are playing with social gifting, both on and offline. There are couple of things to get though from the announcement:

if you read the announcement well, the funding was not made recently but earlier this year, with the first tranch provided late last year. The Akoha team is also going to CIX this week. This is not fortuitous and I believe has been planned meticously. Frequent media apparitions means Akoha is looking for impact, either for an upcoming launch/beta, or either for anohter funding round.
the list of investors is quite interesting; apart from the financial investors, there are media entrepreneurs, professionals in games, and leaders in social initiatives in the provided list, which is smart for Akoha’s founders. As Austin Hill said in a previous talk, it’s important to meet investors in the same space, as they can also be an advisor to your business.

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