Looks like it’s a good time to be in the mobile security business.
Seattle-based Mobilisafe, a startup that just rolled out its product in June, has been acquired by Boston IT security company Rapid7 for an undisclosed price. And Mobilisafe’s technology will live on—Rapid7 will start selling the product as of Wednesday, Mobilisafe co-founder Giri Sreenivas says.
“We will all stay in Seattle and continue on with Rapid7. We will be growing the team here,” Sreenivas reports.
Mobilisafe was founded in 2010 by Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, a pair of former T-Mobile software architects who worked on the Android software development team. The startup raised $1.2 million in venture funding last year from investors including Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Equity Partners, the venture firm started by longtime wireless executive John Stanton.
The company’s software-as-a-service helps IT managers track the array of mobile devices that employees are bringing to work these days. It’s a trend known in the industry as “bring your own device,” or BYOD.
It’s pretty easy to see how that can be a security headache: Employees use an ever-growing list of devices, operating systems, and individual apps to access data over company computer networks, and that means a whole slew of ways for sensitive data to leak out, and malicious hackers to find their way in.
Rapid7 helps organizations find security flaws throughout their IT infrastructure, and then test whether those flaws have been corrected. The company has raised $59 million in venture funding to date, with investors including Technology Crossover Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures, and has offices in both Boston and Cambridge. We’ve tagged Rapid7 as one of the Boston area’s big technology industry bets.
It’s the second time in less than a week that a Boston-area tech firm has snapped up a West Coast mobile security startup. On Friday, we reported on Burlington, MA-based Veracode’s acquisition of Berkeley, CA’s Marvin Mobile Security.
