Goh gains $12.5m backing

Perth inventor and entrepreneur Steven Goh has bounced back from his troubles at online stockbroking firm Sanford Ltd by attracting $US10 million ($A12.5 million) in venture capital funding for his new technology company and emerging from bankruptcy.

Mr Goh’s new company, Project Goth, has developed mig33, a social networking internet application for mobile phones.

mig33 already has more than four million users around the world sending 15 million messages every day and is due to be launched in the US later this year.

The venture capital investment has delivered handsome profits for the Perth investors who put $500,000 of seed capital into Project Goth three years ago.

Those investors, who included Alto Energy International Ltd and Commoditel Ltd chairman Charlie Morgan, were able to sell their shares at eight times their original investment.

Mr Goh is known to many people as the youthful founder of Sanford, which was established in 1996 and rode the dot.com boom to float on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Sanford featured leading edge technology but struggled to make money and was wracked by shareholder and boardroom dissent in its later years.

It was acquired in 2003 by Melbourne company IWL Ltd, which continues to use the Sanford technology as part of its suite of online financial services.

Mr Goh’s troubles mounted in 2004 when he went into bankruptcy after providing a personal guarantee on a failed $700,000 loan to his father, Dr Bean San Goh, and a British Virgin Islands company, First Industries.

The 39-year-old Mr Goh told WA Business News he came out of bankruptcy last month.

The venture capital funding was co-led by Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

“What’s significant is that this is one of the largest VC deals done in Australia, especially from two great US VC firms,” Mr Goh said.

Accel has backed companies including Adobe, Macromedia and Real Networks, and in 2005 invested $US13 million in facebook.com, one of the largest social networking sites in the world.

Redpoint was the only institutional investor to MySpace, the social networking service acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $US580 million in 2005.

Project Goth will use the new funding to expand its mobile phone-based global communications service.

“For most of the world, the mobile phone is already the primary device for connecting to the internet, and this trend is growing in the US,” Mr Goh said.

“Our mobile platform lets anyone get online from just about anywhere they are and immediately begin communicating and sharing with the community.” 

Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy said there was a race on around the world to establish a mobile platform that could be the gateway to the internet.

“We believe mig33 is well down the path of becoming a leader in this global race to bring the internet to most of the world,” he said.

mig33 is designed to work on most mobile phones, even basic models, regardless of carrier.

As well as providing access to the internet, it offers cost savings on VoIP calls, text messaging, instant messaging, chat rooms, profiles and photo sharing.