A report from the Mobile Marketing website this week reported that Nexmo Inc has raised $18m in Series C funding to expand its communication suite from three participants: Sorenson Capital, Intel Capital (News - Alert) and NHN Investment. Nexmo is a cloud-based communication services provider as well as a young and growing telco firm founded in 2010 that has global connections with carriers in every continent. It provides carrier-direct SMS and voice APIs through REST and SMPP that developers can use to reach phones around the world.

Nexmo is able to establish connections directly with over 100 telecommunication networks, local aggregators and SS7 providers. It is able to find the most reliable route of delivery to all served countries (over 200) at any time. As a result, the company is able to provide the most efficient customer experience for their SMS or Voice services. According to Nexmo’s CEO Tony Jamous, the company has handled more than 1.4 billion voice and SMS API transactions.

In as little as three years, Nexmo has grown to a company with a $50 million yearly run rate; the company reached $40 million in 2013 and expects to be on track to reach $50 million in revenue for this year. Nexmo sought out to raise more cash funding from some of the biggest players in the OTT space, including Line, Viber, KakaoTalk, as well as app companies like Airbnb and Hailo, to enable in-app messages direct to handsets.

“Nexmo calls itself a ‘friendly disruptor’ in the telecom industry, as it is ‘removing barriers between carriers and enterprises’. By doing this, Nexmo is creating an ultra-efficient ecosystem between wireless carriers and enterprises,” said Jamous.

According to CEO Jamous, the company grew its revenue by 350 percent from 2012 to 2013. It had a 20 percent average monthly growth rate last year, and this helped it raise a total of $3.83 million; Nexmo is still growing by value and scale. Thanks to the millions it was able to raise last year from Intel Capital, the company was able to improve its mobile messaging API service.

Provided that Nexmo secures the new funds, it will be able to continue to develop its connection business and expanding its suite of communications APIs; it will be able to scale its distribution channels handling millions of messages a month to over 200 countries over a 0-1 hop connection.

This new round of funding will help Nexmo expand its services and prove that it can continue revenue growth and profits generation; only time will tell if it will be able to “grow outside of the OTT [“Over-The-Top Content” message market] as quickly as it grew with it,” as the TechCrunch post points out.