Tango ads, Tango app, content for Tango

Tango has just announced it has closed a $280 million round of funding, led by Alibaba Group with $215 million. The other $65 million coming from some of Tango’s prior investors. Tango previously raised $87 million from Access Industries, DFJ, Qualcomm Ventures, Toms Capital and Translink Capital, as well as Bill Tai, Shimon Weintraub, Jerry Yang, Alex Zubillaga and others. Including the new round, Tango has raised $367 million in venture capital financing to date.

From messaging and calling app to entertainment platform

Tango has become a full-fledged entertainment platform that was built on the foundation of mobile messaging and free video and voice calling and is available for iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, and Windows Phone 7 (though we have yet to see a Windows Phone 8 app). Over the past year, Tango has evolved from a simple messaging and calling app into an entire entertainment platform and last year added Spotify music messaging to its content arsenal. Since then, according to the company, “hundreds of millions of songs” have been shared between members.

This new around of investment as well as Facebook’s recent acquisition of WhatsApp shows how vital the growing messaging and calling app space is.

“[Alibaba’s] investment [is] a clear indication of … how content and services will be delivered to consumers.”

“We are thrilled to bring on Alibaba as a strategic investor,” said Tango CEO and Founder Uri Raz. “Alibaba is a renowned disruptive innovator, and their investment in Tango is a testament to our strategy and a clear indication of the future potential of how content and services will be delivered to consumers.”

“Tango has exhibited tremendous growth because of its unique approach to combine free communications, social and content,” said Joe Tsai, Executive Vice Chairman of Alibaba Group. “We were simply blown away by the vision and quality of the team at Tango and believe they have a disruptive way of looking at the mobile and messaging opportunity.”

Since rolling out social networking features on Tango in July 2013, daily engagement has doubled. In addition, the ability to play games online together with friends on Tango has driven an increasing amount of game downloads and activity.

Registered users have doubled to 200 million in a year with 70 million active users

Tango’s evolution toward an all-in-one messaging, social and content platform has helped double registered users to 200 million compared to a year ago, and monthly active users has reached 70 million.

“A whole new level of connection and sharing of experiences is available through messaging apps that fundamentally affects the way content gets distributed on mobile,” said CTO and co-founder Eric Setton. “This round of funding will enable us to continue to innovate, hire the best talent, aggressively expand our content partnerships, and build a world-class platform as we go after what is truly a big opportunity.”

Tango can be downloaded right here.

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By Josh Robert Nay

Josh Robert Nay is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TruTower. He has worked in the telecommunications industry since 2003 and specializes in GSM based technology. He also uses (too many) VoIP apps and is a long-time user of BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Phone. He adores anything having to do with space exploration and writing. In addition to the links below, he can be found on LinkedIn and can also be found on his website at http://www.joshrobertnay.com.