Skyfire Labs Inc. , makers of the “game-changing” Skyfire mobile browser, announced today that they have raised $13 million in Series B funding. This round of funding is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners , and includes previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures .
This brings the total funding up to $17.8 million, following a $4.8 million Series A round in June of last year. As part of the deal, Jake Seid, Lightspeed’s Managing Director, will be joining Skyfire’s Board of Directors. Skyfire is a mobile browser which offsets a good amount of the page rendering workload to a server, freeing up the handset’s CPU and RAM to crunch things most mobile browsers leave out — namely, Flash and AJAX. Check out the demo video here . This additional funding places further pressure on Skyfire’s main browsing rival, Opera Mobile. While Skyfire is (tentatively) free, Opera Mobile goes for 24 bucks. With Opera Mobile 9.5 facing delays , a free alternative with rich media support is beginning to look mighty tempting.
