Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire, through its HTC America Holding unit, 100% of Seattle-based Mobile-web connected services company Dashwire for a maximum purchase price of $18.5 million to boost its HTCSense.com mobile cloud services offering.








Dashwire offers a range of consumer, social and device management software services for mobile operators, device makers and retailers. The company’s platform is available for Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry.

On its website, Dashwire says it is backed by investors who ‘built the wireless and technology industries’ at McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, Voicestream, Nextel, China Unicom, and Microsoft.

Another investor is Best Buy Capital, the retail giant’s investment arm.

At the end of last year, Dashwire raised $1 million in debt financing.

The company was founded by CEO Ford Davidson, a former Product Manager in the Mobile Devices group at Microsoft. Dashwire’s CTO, James Prudente, helped build critical elements of Amazon’s web operation in its early days, and also helped create the Amazon Mobile group.