Investors including Verizon and Salesforce.com have invested $15.1 million in Urban Airship, a Portland company that provides behind-the-scenes services like push notifications and in-app purchasing for mobile apps from big brands such as Warner Bros., Groupon, and Yahoo, among more than 20,000 customers.

The investment, announced this morning, follows Urban Airship’s acquisition last week of San Francisco startup SimpleGeo, which added new location-based technologies to the Portland company.

Existing Urban Airship investors Foundry Group and True Ventures also participated in the latest investment round. The deal brings total funding of Urban Airship to $21.6 million.

Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton tells reporter Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian that the money will help the company add marketing staff and engineers to build out its push notification technology. The SimpleGeo brought Urban Airship’s total employment to 51 people, and the company plans to add a dozen more job listings to its existing 10 open positions as a result of the funding, Rogoway reports.

In a blog post, Kveton writes that the company is now doing about one billion notifications per month.

“The mobile industry is exploding right now,” he writes. “We’re seeing amazing growth in just about every sector related to mobile and services for app developers are no exception.”

 

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