Unwired Nation Closes $6.5M, Adds Execs
3rd January 2012 · 0 Comments
As 2011 winds down, Unwired Nation, the Mobile-Apps-As-A-Service company, recaps its biggest year yet, with momentum across all business fronts: customers, partners, solutions, leadership, staff and funding. Highlighted by a $6.5 million round of funding, Unwired Nation’s milestones also include a move into new, expanded office space, four key additions to its executive team, and establishing strong relationships with customers in many different industries, standouts being pharmacy industry leaders VoiceTech and VoicePort, and financial services innovator, Q2ebanking.
“Today having a mobile presence, being able to conduct business and interact with customers via mobile devices, whether smart phones or tablets, is absolutely, 100% tablestakes,” said Eric Smith, Unwired Nation CEO and co-founder. “The Unwired Nation Platform goes beyond the ‘one off’ app approach to building mobile apps and addresses the successful web application vendor that now faces the challenge of delivering native mobile apps to customers that demand their own unique look and feel.”
The $6.5 million funding will enable Unwired Nation to capitalize on – and expand – partnership opportunities with established web software companies. The funding will also help fuel additional growth, with Unwired Nation projecting rapid expansion in in 2012, following a 30% growth in both space and headcount in 2011.
The capital infusion and credibility reinforcement of key investors (many of whom are active in driving the company forward) have helped the company attract four key additions to its executive team:
- Unwired Nation COO, Jay Holtz, former VC with Enhanced Capital partners
- Unwired Nation Senior Sales Executive, Steve Hencinski, formerly VP Strategic Sales, Cedar Point Communications
- Unwired Nation Director of Sales Engineering, Frank Geck, formerly with Nuance (the company behind Apple’s Siri Virtual Assistant technology)
- Will Bridges, founder of Clippy and co-owner of Austin-based Lamberts BBQ, joining to assist with business development
“The market has risen to meet Unwired Nation over this past year, and the company has all the right resources in place now to dramatically scale the work they are doing to help companies extend their successful web applications and products to native mobile apps,” said Dale Quisenberry, founder of Austin-based Crossroads Systems and lead investor in Unwired Nation’s financing. Prior Angel investments of Quisenberry’s include NovaCentrix.
Quisenberry, who joins the Unwired Nation board of directors, is one of several key investors and advisors who see the promise of Unwired Nation and are investing time and capital to help the company grow. Two other investors of note are Eric Simone, a Venture Partner in Corsa Ventures and an early investor in BazaarVoice, and Irl Nathan, an early executive with Houston-based Bindview that went public in 1998 and present investor in Caringo, among others. Several high profile advisors also work with Unwired Nation including Steve Vandegrift (Pipeline Success), Geoff Tudor (HP) and Justin Halloran (WhaleShark).
“2011 was the year of building the core value and business case of our unique approach, and about key customer takedowns in valuable industries like financial software and pharmacy,” added Smith. “2012 will be another great year for us as we continue to focus on execution. We are supporting every relevant mobile platform in the market, from the iPhone and iOS to Android and Windows Phone and beyond to tablets. We see mobile as the new web and we are here to help our customers take full advantage of the opportunity to generate substantial new mobile revenue from their existing business, quickly, easily, affordably. Our platform allows our customers to remain focused on their existing web business, not on mobile development, integration or distribution – that’s our job!”
Unwired Nation has built a unique platform that enables the rapid deployment and maintenance of native mobile apps based on a customer’s existing web applications. Unwired Nation provides an easy, repeatable process for deploying and managing thousands of uniquely branded and configured applications. As such, the company has found huge interest from business-to-business web software companies with hundreds or thousands of existing customers who require individually branded mobile apps. Unwired Nation enables these companies to focus on their own web based business applications while Unwired Nation takes care of mobile enablement and app store distribution.
Republished from AustinStartup.com
