Tango是一款信息和视频移动信息应用，这家公司已新募集了惊人的2.80亿美元新风险投资。阿里巴巴（Alibaba Group）牵头投入2.15亿美元，获得了少数股份作为回报。剩余的那部分由Tango现有投资者投入，这些投资者先前已投入了8,000万美元。

    据熟悉情况的一位消息人士称，这笔交易对Tango的估值超过10亿美元。这家公司自己并未讨论估值问题，只是表示，这笔交易实际上并没有受到Facebook收购WhatsApp交易的影响。

    “那件事发生的时候，我们差不多都已经谈好了，”Tango联合创始人兼CTO埃里克•赛顿说。“我认为，基本上，从对于这一领域获得关注的程度和每个人所看到惊人价值来看，收购WhatsApp的那笔交易让每个人感觉都很好。”最初的门户网站一代败给了搜索引擎，但移动应用这一代并不是搜索引擎，甚至也不是应用程序商店。它涉及的是移动信息传输应用，人们每天要查看40次。这给我们创造了一个机会，让我们可以带领人们获得其他的体验。”

    赛顿认为，正是这些其他体验帮助Tango与像WhatsApp等公司区别开来，因为WhatApp依然几乎完全把重点放在了信息传输上。举例来说，Tango用户可以与其他人分享音乐，一起打游戏。这一点可能变得越来越重要，因为世界各地越来越多的用户可以获得无止境的数据流量。

    “举例来说，眼下在美国，消费者的确没有感受到每一条文字信息背后的价格，”赛顿解释说。“因此，它提供给消费者的实际上是将与运营商服务垂直的服务。”

    预计这些筹资的大部分将用于招聘，其中包括为其北京办公室招募员工——这也帮助解释了阿里巴巴为什么会参与进来。阿里巴巴美国投资业务董事长蔡瑟加入了Tango董事会，这也是这笔交易的一部分内容。赛顿表示，阿里巴巴特别吸引他的原因是，阿里巴巴作为一家私有企业如今已经发展到了这么大的规模，而且公司创始人们至今仍然具有很大影响。还值得关注的是，阿里巴巴正准备在今年晚些时候上市，但赛顿不愿探讨自己公司的IPO前景。

    除了这项融资声明外，Tango表示，他的公司最近已经拥有超过2亿“成员”，其中包括7,000万每月活跃用户。可以作为参照的是，WhatsApp发布报告称拥有4.50亿活跃用户，而中国的微信【为腾讯（Tencent）所有】拥有 3.55亿活跃用户（注：各公司对“活跃”的定义并不一致）。（财富中文网）

    译者：老榆木

    Tango, an app for text and video mobile messaging, has raised a whopping $280 million in new venture capital funding. Alibaba Group led the round with a $215 million commitment, in exchange for a minority stake. The remainder was filled out by existing Tango investors, who previously had disbursed $80 million.

    A source familiar with the situation says that the deal values Tango in excess of $1 billion. The company itself is not discussing valuation, except to say that it was not really affected by the Facebook-WhatsApp deal.

    "We were pretty much all done when that happened," explains Tango co-founder and CTO Eric Setton. "I think, in general, that the WhatsApp deal made everyone feel pretty good, in terms of the amount of attention on the space and the remarkable valuations everyone is seeing. The original Web generation was won over by search, but the mobile generation isn't about search or even the app store. It's about mobile messaging, where they're checking 40 times per day, and that gives us the opportunity to bring them into other experiences."

    It's those other experiences that Setton believes helps set Tango apart from a company like WhatsApp, which has remained almost exclusively focused on messaging. For example, Tango users can share music or play games against one another. This could become increasingly important as more and more mobile users around the world get unlimited data plans.

    "In the U.S. right now, for example, consumers don't really feel the price per text message," Setton explains. "So it's really about giving them something orthogonal to what they get from the carriers."

    Expect much of the funding to go toward hiring, including for its office in Beijing -- thus helping to explain the involvement of Alibaba. Michael Zeisser, Alibaba's chairman of U.S. investments, has joined the Tango board of directors as part of the deal. Setton says that he was particularly attracted to Alibaba because it has grown so large as a privately-held enterprise in which its founders still have a large impact. It's probably also worth noting that Alibaba is preparing to go public later this year, although Setton didn't want to talk about IPO prospects for his own company.

    In addition to the funding announcement, Tango says that it recently passed the 200 million "member" mark, which includes 70 million active monthly users. For context, WhatsApp reports 450 million active users, while China's WeChat (owned by Tencent) reports 355 million active users (note: definitions of "active" may vary from company to company).