CloudMosa, the company behind the ‘wicked fast’ Puffin mobile browser, just raised $18M

CloudMosa — the maker of Puffin, a cloud-powered mobile browser — today revealed it has secured at least $18 million in funding and may raise $4.9 million more as it charges past the 25 million user mark.

Founded by Shioupyn Shen in 2009, CloudMosa says its browser shifts the workload from your mobile device to its remote servers. As a result, the Puffin mobile web browser is “wicked fast” — at least, that’s what CloudMosa says when promoting its three apps, Puffin Web Browser Free, Puffin Web Browser, and Puffin Academy (a browser designed for K-12 students).

Aside from potential speed benefits, part of Puffin’s claim to fame is its support of Flash on mobile. As you might guess, Puffin can run flash because it offloads all the work to its Dell cloud servers.

Inventec Ventures may have participated in the $18 million round; the firm’s vice president Gia-Shuh Jang is listed as a director in CloudMosa’s public filing with the SEC. We’ve reached out to CloudMosa for more.

Puffin is available on both iOS and Android and apparently ranks among the top tablet browsers in 40 countries by usage.