Open source web meeting tool DimDim gets $6 million in series B

The Open source web meeting start-up DimDim got a financial injection of $6 million dollars in a series B round of funding (pdf file), led by existing investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards (from the US, Europe, and Asia). The goals of the company are exactly the ones you expect from one who just got a second round: expanding their reach and improving the product.

So what’s this product?

DimDim is a free service that helps you organizing gatherings for a few to hundreds of people. Features like sharing desktops, showing slides, chatting, and broadcasting via web cam give a digital conference the feeling of a real one. So imagine you’d like to throw a little digital party with all of your Facebook buddies all over the world, DimDim will then supply you with a digital conference room and all the tools to get these people together. But you might as well live in Florida and teach English to Mexican immigrants who are about to cross the U.S. border.

Democratizing web meetings

The service is free up to 20 persons, when your meeting gets too popular for that, you can chose some of their other editions – starting at $99 per year. That’s a whole lot cheaper than its main competitor, WebEx, which has editions starting at $375 per month (only 5 users allowed). You can probably imagine by now why many people believe DimDim democratizes web meetings, as they make it accesible for parties who are not part of the corporate world.

Pretty successful so far

DD Ganguly, ceo and co-founder of Dimdim, had some more good news to tell the press, as the service is pretty successful so far. “Dimdim has had an incredible ten months since our private launch at DemoFall 2007. Now more than 500,000 people in more than 180 countries have attended Dimdim Web Meetings”. I’m sure that a fair percentage of this people gets hooked on the service, and will switch to the paid versions as their web meetings gain popularity. This loyal user base makes the future of DimDim look really bright, as bright as the design of their fancy website.