San Diego’s Qualcomm Ventures is showing its confidence in Visage Mobile‘s back-from-the-dead strategy by leading a new investment round in the San Francisco-based company.
Tim Weingarten, who stepped in as Visage CEO in 2008, tells me the company has secured $4.5 million in its second round venture funding since 2008, when the company sold most of its assets to Convergys on terms that were not disclosed. Visage Mobile basically restarted its business in late 2008 under the same name, but with a different business focus on Software-as-a-Service technology that enables customers to better control their costs and to set policies that govern employee usage of smartphones and mobile broadband.
The company previously specialized in developing software for mobile virtual network operators like Disney Mobile, which closed down at the end of 2007. In its previous incarnation, Visage Mobile raised about $93 million through at least five rounds of venture capital funding since it was founded in 2001 until it hit the wall in 2008.
The company built its new strategy to provide Software-as-a-Service around technology that Visage Mobile had gained through its October 2007 acquisition of Pleasanton, CA-based Agistics. Luckily, the Agistics buyout was part of a planned expansion that was made possible by a $10 million venture round that had closed just four months earlier. Weingarten says the company was able to launch its new product in 18 months. Visage Mobile’s investors at that time included