Start-up Tango sweeps up $280M in funding

SAN FRANCISCO File this under This Is Not a Typo: Tango has landed a $215 million investment from IPO-bound Alibaba Group.

Another $65 million is coming from existing investors.

With the $280 million infusion, 5-year-old Tango has accumulated $367 million in funding since June 2010.

Such lofty investments could give Tango a market value of $2 billion to $3 billion, paving the way for an eventual IPO, says Marcos Sanchez, a communications specialist who has been part of the San Francisco start-up scene for years.

The 160-person mobile-messaging Tango intends to use its latest chunk of funding to add staff in the U.S. and China in an ongoing effort to ramp up distribution in North America and Asia.

“We’re changing the face of mobile messaging and the communications space itself,” Tango Chief Technology Officer Eric Setton said in a telephone interview.

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

“We ... believe (Tango has) a disruptive way of looking at the mobile and messaging opportunity,” Joe Tsai, executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group, said in a statement.

Venture money is flowing into promising start-ups such as Tango as investors bet on companies that either are acquired for outlandish sums (Facebook is ponying up to $19 billion for mobile-message app WhatsApp) or fetch mega IPOs, such as Alibaba.

“In any prior era, every single one of these companies would already be public,” Marc Andreessen, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, said in a tweet to USA TODAY.

Sean O’Sullivan, a partner at SOSventures Investments, invoked the B word.

“It’s a bubble when three-person start-ups with no revenue are getting valuations of $10 million,” he said. “Is real value creation happening in tech these days? Yup.”