Qualcomm Ventures Leads New Investment Round in Revived Visage Mobile

San Diego’s Qualcomm Ventures is showing its confidence in Visage Mobile‘s back-from-the-dead strategy by leading a new investment round in the San Francisco-based company.

Tim Weingarten, who stepped in as Visage CEO in 2008, tells me the company has secured $4.5 million in its second round venture funding since 2008, when the company sold most of its assets to Convergys on terms that were not disclosed. Visage Mobile basically restarted its business in late 2008 under the same name, but with a different business focus on Software-as-a-Service technology that enables customers to better control their costs and to set policies that govern employee usage of smartphones and mobile broadband.

The company previously specialized in developing software for mobile virtual network operators like Disney Mobile, which closed down at the end of 2007. In its previous incarnation, Visage Mobile raised about $93 million through at least five rounds of venture capital funding since it was founded in 2001 until it hit the wall in 2008.

The company built its new strategy to provide Software-as-a-Service around technology that Visage Mobile had gained through its October 2007 acquisition of Pleasanton, CA-based Agistics. Luckily, the Agistics buyout was part of a planned expansion that was made possible by a $10 million venture round that had closed just four months earlier. Weingarten says the company was able to launch its new product in 18 months. Visage Mobile’s investors at that time included

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.