Infospace Exits Mobile Business; Motricity Buys Its Mobile Services Business For $135 Million
The deal has gone through after rumors for the last two months—InfoSpace (NSDQ: INSP) has sold its mobile services business to Motricity for $135 million in cash, meaning that the company will now be solely focused on online search. INSP also recently sold its online directory business for $225 million in cash. Once the transaction closes InfoSpace expects to have $550 million in cash, and will return part of it back to investors as a special cash distribution.
On its side, Motricity raised the funds from VC investment to buy the InfoSpace business, and there’s some gossip that this may give the company enough revenues to get a decent IPO going. The deal was funded primarily by financier Carl Icahn, who first invested in Motricity earlier this year, and Chicago VC firm Advanced Equities, which has led previous rounds of financing for the company. More info on MocoNews here.
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Oct 16, 2007 9:52 AM
Wow, amidst all the investment opportunities for Motricity and its board, they chose the hemmhoraging (or hemmorhoidal) assets of Infospace—yes, that dog. Now they are stirring up IPO rumours—this is one Amp’d house of cards with Humpty Dumpty sitting on top…everyone in this cloistered and incestuous industry knows that ATT is cutting margins for content distributors and aggregators and off-deck is still pitifully small—time to get out of mobile content!
Oct 21, 2007 2:42 PM
make that one cash rich dog, i.e.,..infospace now has in excess of $550 million in cash. ;)..bow-wow!