Clickatell, providing personalized priority messaging as a service, recently announced that it has secured $12 million in a series B round of venture funding, which was led by Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures.

The new funding will be used to further the company's expansion into new service areas and geographies where automated, just-in-time mobile messaging is powering huge gains in customer engagement and value and will also open the door to new mobile transactions.

In a release, Pieter de Viliers, CEO and co-founder of Clickatell said that "Clickatell (News - Alert) was early in recognizing the immense power of mobile messaging to transform the customer experience. With the capacity to reach some 70 percent of the world's population, Personalized Priority Messaging can help companies of all sizes create more welcoming and helpful brands by delivering just the right message, to the right person at the right time.”

Viliers continued, “We're excited by our continued relationship with Sequoia Capital (News - Alert) and value their insight into various markets and sectors. We are also happy to welcome to our team DAG Ventures whom we enjoyed working with on this transaction. Mobile is the new medium of consumer engagement, and brands from Lagos to London are recognizing this. Clickatell is very well positioned to become an even stronger leader in Business-to-Consumer Mobile messaging and transaction enablement. We are excited by the future mobile has to offer."

Clickatell is experiencing tremendous growth and now has more than 13,000 customers that utilize its award-winning mobile messaging API's and global delivery infrastructure that helps them to reach and respond to customers across 869 networks in 223 countries and territories.

The Personalized Priority Messaging via Clickatell is embedded into virtually any business process which helps an organization to increase its capacity to offer new levels of customer help and engagement using mobile text messaging (SMS).

Mike Goguen, managing partner at Sequoia Capital said, "Global adoption of mobile messaging as a powerful channel of engagement continues to astound. Some 6.1 trillion SMS messages were sent in 2010, triple the volume of 2007. Clickatell continues to be a leader in this market, with both the vision and the execution capabilities to realize the opportunities inherent in this market."

Nicholas K. Pianim, managing director at DAG Ventures said, "Clickatell is well positioned to take advantage of the continuing growth of mobile messaging in both emerging and developed markets. New Clickatell solutions to power mobile transactions in Africa and increase U.S. small business adoption of Personalized Priority Messaging represent exciting new opportunities for growth."