Google Joins $100 Million Investment In Symphony

Alphabet's company Google, among other Wall Street investors, has infused $100 million into messaging start-up Symphony Communications Services.

Lakestar, Natixis, Societe Generale and UBS were also among the new investors, along with a group of existing investors from Silicon Valley venture firm Merus Capital. The funding contributes to the company's previously raised $66 million from a consortium of 15 Wall Street financial institutions.

"This amount gives us the runway to stay focused on our vision of becoming the standard for business communications and allow us to accelerate our growth globally," Symphony CEO David Gurle wrote in a post Monday. "We will increase our product development team, as well as fill our sales and account management positions globally to meet the very high customer demand at our doors."

The increase in product development means doubling the number of employees during the next 1.5 years and expanding its presence in Europe and into other markets. Typically, companies also look for acquisitions when they have a heavy engineering team, similar to Symphony.

Millennials are among the highest personal users of messaging apps. Facebook's platform tops the list at 25.7 monthly hours among U.S. Millennials, according to comScore's 2015 U.S. Mobile App Report released September 2015. In eMarketer's compiled list. Instagram is next with 7 hours monthly followed by Snapchat at 5.9 hours; Tumblr with 5.7 hours; and Twitter at 3.5 hours.

Symphony offers a variety of unique features for use in personal, business and financial sectors. For instance, the search feature in the personal messaging app allows users to search through all content by IMs, room and date; conversations, tokens and terms; hashtags, cashtags and mentions; among others. When users start typing their most recent searches, the query results display as a pick list.

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