San Diego’s Antengo Marching to Next Round in Mobile Classified Ads

Antego mobile classified ads

Apple’s iOS to the Android operating system, Samsung Galaxy tablet, Windows Phone, and the Kindle Fire.

After downloading Antengo’s free app, users can browse listings without logging in, using simple keyword searches. Users who want to post a listing must register. Antengo listings are also posted automatically to Craigslist, but one of the big advantages to mobile classifieds is what you might call mobile scalping—real-time offerings of tickets for things like concerts, festivals, and sporting events. Listings are searchable by the location (and proximity), time published, and other categories. Antengo also enables buyers and sellers to send instant messages without sharing their user names or phone numbers.

Now Wandell says Antengo is ready to take a bigger step—to look for substantially more capital than the $575,000 raised so far, and to expand the company’s technology beyond its existing five mobile products. More than two-thirds of the company’s seed funding came from one investor, which Wandell describes only as the venture arm of a Fortune 500 company, with the rest coming from individual investors. “We don’t need to raise a massive Series A round,” Wandell says, “but we need to scale and build on our momentum.”

Antengo mobile classified ads
Antengo screenshot

Antengo has counted more than 250,000 cumulative downloads of its app, and the number of active users doubled during the third quarter that ended September 30, Wandell says.

Antengo also has added some key management expertise to the original team, which includes roughly 10 full-time and part-time employees. Eric Franchomme, who led advanced mobile software development at San Diego’s PacketVideo and has deep Android experience, joined Antengo as vice president of engineering. Former Chumby Industries CEO Derrick Oien also agreed to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.