LIA Raises $400K for Mobile App Targeting Enterprise-Scale Customers

After a period of relatively rapid software development, San Diego-based LIA has raised $400,000 in seed financing to extend development of its mobile app and secure, Web-based platform for enterprise-scale customers.

The convertible loan from two San Diego investors, Analytics Ventures and La Costa Investment Group, will be used to fund another round of software development at LIA, said CEO David Warren, who founded the startup last year. Both funds are boutique firms making seed stage investments.

LIA provides its software as a service to help big organizations with global operations unify the work done by different groups in far-flung corners of the world. “What we built is a software platform for tablets that helps sales people in the field sell faster and sell better, and it helps that marketing person control the message in a better way,” Warren said.

LIA CEO David Warren

The year-old startup was known as Liberated Intelligence and Analytics in December, when it won the most innovative new product award for best mobile app from Connect, the San Diego non-profit group supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. Since then, Warren said he’s decided to dispense with the long business name for the company, and just use the shorter and catchier LIA.

“We used 2012 to validate the business, and answer the question whether more Fortune 500 companies will buy this,” Warren said. The LIA platform enables a corporate customer to securely publish its business intelligence and other relevant internal information in any language to its sales personnel, business development executives, tradeshow employees, and other authorized users. LIA’s technology can be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint, which is traditionally used by companies to manage documents and content stored on internal networks. LIA provides a user name and password to each authorized user, who can download the LIA mobile app from the Apple Store or Android Market.

“We got buy-in from three Fortune 500 companies last year,” Warren said, enabling LIA to

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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.