New York’s Enterproid and the Great Divide, Where Rivers (of Data) Change Direction

When Andrew Toy, Alexander Trewby, and David Zhu worked together at Morgan Stanley in 2007, they collectively managed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for the global financial services company and its 60,000 employees. At that time, Morgan Stanley’s implementation of the corporate platform for e-mail messaging, calendaring, and collaborating was considered to be the largest in the world.

As a result, Toy, Trewby, and Zhu had a good sense of the strict data security requirements and stringent banking and securities compliance policies that governed mobile services for major business operations.

But they also saw the proliferation of mobile apps for the iPhone and the coming wave of broad-based, consumer app development that Android’s open mobile platform now makes possible. And they could see that such consumer apps on an open mobile device were fundamentally incompatible with the enterprise mobile paradigm that the BlackBerry exemplifies.

Instead of putting business users in the position of using two mobile devices—one smart phone for business and another for pleasure—the trio developed technology that enables users to combine a mobile consumer system and a secure enterprise system on the same Android-based mobile device. Called “Divide,” the technology is the core offering from Enterproid, a New York-based startup that Toy, Trewby, and Zhu founded in 2010. It is listed as a portfolio company of High Peaks Venture Partners, based in Troy, NY.

“Divide allows you to maintain completely separate profiles—personal and professional—on a single Android device,” says Michael Kirkland, a spokesman for the company in San Francisco.

Enterproid launched a private beta version of its Divide platform on Feb. 28, the same day that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego wireless giant, named the startup as the grand prize winner of its 2011 QPrize.

“It was a fairly unanimous choice,” Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap told me last month. The startup won $100,000 in convertible note financing (a Qualcomm loan that converts to stock when Enterproid raises its first equity round) by winning the top prize in North America, and another $150,000 as the Grand Prize winner against other finalists from Israel, Europe, South Korea, India, and China.

“They had a lot of relevant experience by being at Morgan Stanley,” said Kashyap, who oversees the annual

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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.