New Citrix Startup Accelerator Makes Seed Investment in San Diego’s Nukona

Nukona, a Solana Beach, CA-based software developer that enables IT administrators to manage consumer-oriented mobile apps, says today it has closed on a funding round led by Citrix Systems’ Startup Accelerator program in Santa Clara, CA.

The corporate incubator program was launched earlier this year by Fort Lauderdale, FL-based Citrix Systems. The accelerator program, which can last as long as 18 months, provides seed funding, office space, business mentoring, access to Citrix technology, and other benefits to qualifying startups. In April, the accelerator announced a “global challenge” to determine the first 12 early stage companies to be admitted to the program.

John McIntyre, managing director of the Citrix Startup Accelerator, wrote about the Nukona investment on his blog last month. McIntyre also listed all 12 of the startups selected for the program on his blog three months ago, and writes that the Startup Accelerator Center is staging an open house tomorrow evening.

Nukona disclosed in an e-mail today that it had landed funding from the corporate accelerator. The suburban San Diego company did not reveal the amount of funding it has received, but Citrix said in April that winners of its global challenge competition would be eligible for up to $400,000 in seed money.

In the e-mail from Nukona, co-founder and CEO Chris Perret said the funding round, which also included some angel investors, would be used to accelerate a number of security and policy management features for Nukona’s flagship App Center product line.

Nukona says on its website that its technology addresses the headaches that enterprise IT administrators face as authorized network users adopt consumer-oriented personal devices for use in corporate applications. The company says it specializes in the mobile security problems posed by Android and iOS-based devices, as well as apps downloaded from private app stores.

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.