For almost two years, Pyxis Mobile has been restructuring its business to sell platforms for mobile app development, but was lacking the capital to make the switch official, says CEO Steven Levy. That’s over now, with Waltham, MA-based Pyxis announcing today that it has socked away $17 million in new funding and has rebranded as Verivo Software. The deal was led by new investor Commonwealth Capital and included previous Pyxis investors Ascent Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital.
Verivo is taking the mobile app-building platform from Pyxis, which previously created and sold apps to customers in the financial services industry. But around 2010 the company realized that the “platform had more value than the apps,” says Levy, who joined Pyxis in July 2010. Selling platforms for enterprise app development has become a popular business model for mobile startups in Boston and beyond.
“The new business is focused on entirely platform; we secured the capital to really go ahead and pursue this plan aggressively,” he says.
Verivo plans to sell its technology as tools to large and small companies, like grocery stores, that are looking to add a mobile component to their business. The platform is designed to help them build applications that will run on different mobile operating systems, and also address problems that are specifically related to enterprise-level applications, like syncing back-end data, meeting corporate IT requirements for security, and quickly adapting to changes in mobile devices and operating systems.
“We want to solve the problem of helping those businesses go from an idea they have in enterprise mobility to it impacting their bottom line as quickly and as easily as possible,” says Levy.
And what about the financial services companies that were using the apps Pyxis built for them? They always had access to the platform their apps were built on, but often couldn’t use its full line of features because their individual IT departments didn’t recognize it on the platform level. The Verivo rebrand allows its clients to tap into these more fully, says Levy.
