Rebtel Networks, one of a small crop of new mobile VoIP companies, said Tuesday it has received $20 million in a first round of funding from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.

Rebtel offers users international calling at local rates from their mobile phones for $1 a week. Registered users of Rebtel’s web site fill in their phone number and the phone number of the party they want to phone.

Then each person receives a newly generated local phone number to reach that person, so whenever they speak to one another, they are charged local phone rates (which in many cases, is free). Local calls are connected using VoIP technology, rather than the traditional telephone network.

The company claims that “tens of thousands” of users have signed up since the service launched in July.

“Skype leveraged the PC and the use of broadband to make free calls over the PC,” said Rebtel CEO Hjalmar Winbladh in an interview. “We are leveraging the minutes on a mobile bucket plan to offer cheap phoning.”

Mr. Winbladh said that Rebtel will strongly focus on accessing the United States market, where more than 80 percent of mobile users take advantage of buckets of minutes from a mobile service provider, providing them a flat fee for local calls.

Danny Rimer, a partner with Index, said he discovered the company while trolling the Internet.

“We think this is an incredibly attractive service and we don’t want them to waste their time on seeking financing,” he said, referring to the relatively generous amount of first-round funding.

Experienced Entrepreneurs

Until now, the company has been self-financed by the founders, who are experienced entrepreneurs.

Mr. Winbladh and chief technical officer Jonas Lindroth co-founded Send It—which developed mobile Internet application server platforms for GSM (global system for mobile communications) phone networks—to Microsoft for $150 million in 1999. Both then proceeded to sail around the world, before returning to their native Sweden.

Mr. Winbladh said the founding team spent the last year putting in place gateways and agreements to run its service in 35 countries.

Last week the company said it had struck a deal with the Polish Internet portal owner Grupa Onet.pl SA, which runs the Polish portal Onet.pl, under which Polish users can link right to Rebtel’s service.

Rebtel offers two services: REBout and REBin. REBout generates a local number to call anywhere in the world, and the user pays the carrier for the local calls, plus a small per-minute fee that varies from country to country, which Rebtel uses to cover the interconnect charges for the international part of the call.

REBin is an even cheaper option. When users place a call, they ask the person they phone to hang up and call them back on their local Rebtel number. The ensuing phone call is free.

Although its VC backers claim Rebtel is unique, a handful of other startups seek to help users bypass expensive mobile phone calls by routing traffic over the Internet. Among them are Jajah, MINO, Switch-Mobile and MobileSphere (see VoIP Startups Go Mobile)

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