Bluepulse has reeled in $6 million from former MySpace investor VantagePoint Venture Partners and moved from Australia into the former YouTube digs in San Mateo, California, in a bid to race to the front of the mobile social networking pack.

Tuesday’s funding announcement came a day after rival mobile social networking entrant MocoSpace disclosed that General Catalyst Partners had led a $3 million A round.

With MySpace and Facebook dominating the domestic social networking landscape on personal computers, mobile devices have become the new battleground. Along with Bluepulse and Boston-based MocoSpace, companies like Groovr and Twitter are vying to stake out pieces of the mobile community business.

Eric Ver Ploeg, managing director at VantagePoint, said Bluepulse, with about 100 million page views per month after a December beta launch, has the business “nailed.”

“We’ve been investors in the mobile space for six and a half years now,” he said. “We were also the main investors in MySpace and through that saw the key parameters in the social networking model.”

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought Intermix Media, the parent of MySpace, for $580 million in 2005, providing a handsome return for VantagePoint.

Bluepulse’s 25-year-old chief executive, Ben Keighran, began writing the code on which Bluepulse is based when he was a computer science student at the University of Technology in Sydney.

He grew frustrated when he was unable to share a mobile application he had written with his friends. Mr. Keighran then met Tony Faure, Yahoo’s former regional vice president and managing director of South Asia, who encouraged him to build a platform that would be the foundation of a “killer app for mobile.”

Mr. Keighran ultimately dropped out of the university to pursue the project. With users in 150 countries, Bluepulse lets any mobile phone user with a data plan to download its software and text, chat, create pages and use widgets. The company plans to carry advertising once it has built a large community and already has begun tests with ad networks.

Mr. Ver Ploeg predicted that one dominant company along with several niche players are likely to emerge from the competition in mobile social networking.

“I’d be surprised if, by the end of next year, there wasn’t a clear winner emerging,” he said. That winners circle is unlikely to include MySpace or Facebook, he added. Though they will have mobile extensions to their social networks, Mr. Ver Ploeg argued they are unlikely to be able to translate their PC-based popularity into mobile dominance when competing against companies focused solely on handheld devices.