Voice SMS company Kirusa, which had earlier received $10 million in Series C funding from Helion Venture Partners and Nexus India Capital, has closed that round of funding with an additional $3.3 million with three new investors on board: Qualcomm Ventures has led the investment, with participation from Eastven Partners (succesor fund to Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) Venture Partners) and Erasmic Venture Fund. Kirusa holds a US patent for its Voice SMS technology, and has customers including Tata Telecom, Idea Cellular, MTNL and BPL in India, GrameenPhone and Warid Telecom in Bangadesh, Ufone, Warid Telecom and China Mobile in Pakistan, among others. [release]

The money will be used to fund global expansion and an increase in R&D activities. Kirusa claims there are millions of users of Voice SMS...just seems like glorified voice mail to me, which itself doesn’t have many takers in India. From the release: “A user presses the ‘star’ key, followed by the recipient’s number, and speaks a short message of up to 30 seconds. The recipient gets an SMS message from the sender, and can “click” (or dial) a number in the message to directly access the spoken message. After listening to the message, the recipient can reply by voice, or by text, or can forward the message.”