Amsterdam-based IM service eBuddy has raised €6.5 million in a Series B round of funding led by Prime Technology Ventures this week. The company had previously raised €5 million from Lowland capital. eBuddy will use the investment capital for serious growth and expansion into the UK and have already established a small office in London and have a small sales staff on the ground here. eBuddy is also working on an API. Prime Technology Ventures led the investment round and has offices both in Cambridge and Amsterdam.
Meebo is eBuddy’s main competitor and is based in Silicon Valley, but perhaps because of that gets more press despite being equivalent in users according to worldwide Comscore numbers (4.8 million unique visitors for Meebo in December 2007, 4.5 million for eBuddy). Ebuddy says their internal stats actually show 12 million monthly uniques, with 1.5 million new users being added monthly. eBuddy users can log into AOL, Google Talk, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo Messenger from their website, without the need to download any additional software. The company was originally called eMessenger, but relaunched as eBuddy in June 2006.