NetMotion Wireless Inc., a spin out from WRQ’s Mobile Access Business Unit, is the latest Seattle area company to secure a substantial amount of VC funding.
The company secured $8 million in a first round of institutional financing led by SeaPoint Ventures and Northwest Venture Associates. The round also includes significant investments from Digital Partners, Fluke Venture Partners, SilverHaze Partners and E-Fund LLC.
WRQ will maintain a minority investment in NetMotion Wireless and former WRQ president, Craig McKibben, will head the wireless spin off as president and CEO.
“Carving out NetMotion is an important step in WRQ’s strategy to focus its resources on the vital, billion-dollar enterprise integration market,” says Doug Walker, WRQ chairman and CEO.
“We’re proud of the innovative NetMotion technology which was created internally by a talented team. We saw that the NetMotion technology had enormous potential, and by creating a separate company, under the experienced leadership of Craig McKibben, 100 percent of its resources could be directed to maximizing this opportunity.”
Within enterprises, the NetMotion Mobility Solution is ideal for both end users and IT managers. For end users, it provides persistent application sessions, allowing users to suspend-and-resume, roam between subnets, roam from LAN to WAN, or drop connections, and then resume their work right where they left off. The NetMotion client runs transparently on Windows-based mobile devices including Microsoft Windows 95/98, Windows CE and Pocket PC.
The enterprise wireless LAN market is expected to grow from $771 million in 1999 to $2.2 billion in 2004, a 25 percent compound annual growth rate, according to Cahners In-Stat Group. And the research firm believes that shipments of wireless access devices will sustain double and triple digit growth through 2004. Other analyst firms project that fifty percent of all enterprises will have wireless LANs by 2002 and that 60 percent of employees will be mobilized by 2005.
“NetMotion is at forefront of the race to create truly wireless enterprises with the only roamable, secure and persistent solution on the market today,” says Chris Brookfield, Northwest Venture Associates general partner.
Back on the money front, seattle.internet.com asked NetMotion VP of Marketing Shelly Julien, why she believes her company was successful in securing funding during these rough times. Julien believes that the success is based on a combination of the company’s unique technology and seasoned management.
And what does the company plan on doing with the money?
Julien told seattle.internet.com that, in the short-term, the company plans on staffing up its sales and marketing team. On the longer term, the company plans on investing in development to fill up platforms that it supports. “For example right now we support a lot of the Windows platform. We are filling out our Windows platform more this year…and then we will look into expanding into areas such as UNIX,” says Julien.
