Japanese Chat App ‘Balloon’ Raises $1.25 Million in Funding

For those of you who thought that the mobile messaging application space in Asia was crowded already, there aren’t really any signs that it might thin out anytime soon. With Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and even DeNA’s Comm joining the party, there are certainly lots of options to choose from.

TechCrunch Japan reports that another Japanese player, Balloon (www.balloon.am), has received 100 million yen ($1.25 million) in funding from Nissay Capital. The new funds will be mostly directed towards marketing and promotion.

Like many of these chat applications, Ballon features group messaging functionality, voice messages, and photos. Voice calls, video sharing, and ‘sound stickers’ were added in a recent Balloon 2.0 update of the service, which also brought an overhauled user interface. As you can see from the screenshots below below, the interface is an interesting mix of graphics, chat messages, and audio. I’ve yet to give it a good test run, but I look forward to trying it out to see how it compares with its many competitors.

So far the service is available in English and Japanese, but more languages are said to be one the way. If you’d like to download Ballon, it’s available for iOS, with Android coming soon.

[Via H. Nishikawa]