Dimdim Cashes In on Free Web Conferencing

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, July 10. 2008 at 09:20 AM EDT Post a comment

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Web conferencing provider Dimdim Inc. announced yesterday that it raised $6 million in Series B funding to help it compete against online meeting heavyweight Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO).

Dimdim's most recent round was led by existing investors Index Ventures , Nexus India Capital , and Draper Richards LP . Altogether the company has raised $9 million.

Dimdim offers a Web-based collaborative meeting technology similar to Cisco's WebEx. But while the WebEx service is based on proprietary technology, Dimdim's conferencing service is open source.

Also, unlike WebEx, Dimdim users don't need to download a plug-in to get the service to work. The Web application is built on AJAX and Adobe Flash.

Another key differentiator is price. Dimdim cofounder and CEO D.D. Ganguly says his service is "priced to be disruptive" to the online conferencing market.

And disruptive it is. The company offers some an ad-supported free version of the service with limited functionality. For those users that need more, Dimdim also offers a "Pro" version for $99 per year and an enterprise version that starts at $4,500.

The company claims to have hosted 500,000 users in 180 countries. And Ganguly says not all of those were free sessions. He says the company has 270 paying customers, including H&R Block, which uses Dimdim's technology to power its AskForTaxAdvice.com Website.

With the funding, Dimdim will look to increase its presence in the online conferencing space. Ganguly says the company will use the cash to ramp up engineering and support, as well as increase its sales and marketing staff.