Taiwan’s Chat App ‘Cubie’ Raises $1.1 Million, Joins 500 Startups Accelerator

Haven’t heard enough of mobile messaging apps this week? The Next Web is reporting that Taiwan-based Cubie has just raised $1.1 million in series A seed funding from a group of investors, including B Dash Ventures, NTT Investment Partners, Gumi Ventures, and 500 Startups.

Speaking of 500 Startups, Cubie was also among one of the many new startups included in the latest batch for Silicon-Valley accelerator program. Over on the Cubie blog, the startup explains why joining the program is an important step in its growth into new markets:

500 Startups has, from its inception, shown kickass leadership from women and a focus on for-women services, strengths which we hope to take advantage of over the coming months. We want to learn how to better serve our users and reach out to new ones in North America and elsewhere. 500’s team of partners, mentors and coaches will, we think, be one of our best resources to achieve that.

As we’ve pointed out over the past week, there is a strong field of mobile messaging apps coming out of Asia. Line from Japan, KakaoTalk from Korea, and WeChat from China are the most notable players to date. DeNA recently launched it’s Comm chat app, and yesterday we told you about Balloon, who just raised funding from Nissay Capital.

But the folks at Cubie say that they “don’t believe messaging is a zero sum game” and that in this field with no established leader yet, there is still a lot of opportunity for everyone involved. Cubie has been pushing a strong focus on services for women, so it may be able to ride that differentiator to stand out from the rest.