UMC Capital, Nomura, Worldview Technology Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, Emergence Capital Partners, Palisades Ventures and Selby Ventures Partners.
After scrapping the old business plan, the company re-capitalized in mid-2009 with $2 million invested by Vesbridge Partners and Emergence Capital Partners. It wasn’t an easy sell, Weingarten says, noting that the previous year or so “certainly was a tough time to be talking to VCs.” Visage Wireless now has 25 employees, Weingarten says. In an e-mail yesterday afternoon, Weingarten adds, “As part of the restart all the investors who were believers and supportive of the new product and market direction were able to maintain their equity ownership. This includes Emergence Capital, Worldview Technology Partners, and Vesbridge Capital.”
Those three investors, along with ATA Ventures, joined Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) in the current round. Weingarten tells me the funding will be used to further invest in Visage Mobile’s product development, go-to-market strategies, and Web-based services.
“One of the things that got Qualcomm excited was the fact that we were able to launch our service [in 2009] and grow our customer base to 100 customers that fast and in such a difficult environment,” Weingarten says. The current investment round reflects Qualcomm’s recognition of the strong pain point that managing mobile phones poses for corporate IT managers, Weingarten says.
In a statement issued by Visage Mobile, Nagraj Kashyap of Qualcomm Ventures says, “We believe Visage Mobile is well positioned to change the way businesses look at their wireless management and [will] help proliferate the use of mobile broadband devices.”
