Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York’s Startup of the Moment

GroupMe, a New York startup that lets users send group text messages to to their cell phones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million.

Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci have raised a $9 million round led by Khosla Ventures, sources say. I’m told the deal will give the company a pre-money value in the “mid-20s”.

Original investors including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again.

As The Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson has reported, a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday.

So what is it? GroupMe is a simple free service that lets users send text messages, on any kind of phone, to groups of friends. It competes against a handful of similar companies, but investors are impressed at its growth chart, which shows it adding tens of thousands of users a month.

They also like the fact that the company is explicitly targeting a wide range of users — not just those using Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. GroupMe works on any run of the mill “dumbphone”, and part of the company’s pitch is that salt of the earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August.

It’s also worth noting that Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot startups — Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively — to put their own thing together. The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May.

GroupMe plans on adding an array of bells and whistles to the service, like the ability to send pictures, and a sort of jerry-rigged location feature in the near future. And the more it adds of those, the more it will looks like something that aspires to play in the same sandbox as Twitter and Facebook.

But what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York startup — Foursquare. It’s worth nothing that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out. They got this one.

I shot this interview with the two cofounders just two weeks ago* but wasn’t going to run it, because the two of them are framed so comically –Martocci is a tall dude, but he’s not that much taller than Hecht.

But it’s better than nothing, and now that these guys are officially the hot startup of the moment, it’s time for the rest of you to meet them. Sorry, Jared and Steve. But lousy video about big news is a high quality problem.