If you are an Irish software company trying to raise $14 million (€10.5 million) in the current climate, it probably helps to have an intimate knowledge of the funding game. John Collinsreports.
AdaptiveMobile announced it had received just such a sum in a second round of funding led by Doughty Hanson, with Kuwait's Noor Investments as well as existing investor Intel Capital.
Given that Mapflow's €9 million fundraising is the only other venture deal publicly revealed this year, AdaptiveMobile's fundraising is even more impressive.
But Adaptive had an ace up its sleeve: chief executive Lorcan Burke and chief operations officer Gareth Maclachlan are both former venture capitalists who worked for funds in London for a number of years.
"We certainly knew who we didn't want investing in us," says Burke jokingly.
If past form is anything to go by, Adaptive won't be splashing the cash on corporate frivolities. About half of the company's 85 staff are based in the rather basic environs of the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin's Liberties and, following the funding, Burke's major concession was the purchase of a foosball table - bought second hand on eBay.
Maclachlan and Burke founded the company with general manager John Kennedy and chief technology officer Brendan Dillon.
The premise was simple - with mobile data services set to take off, mobile operators were going to face the same security issues as in the PC realm, such as viruses, filtering inappropriate content and ensuring corporate devices are not used inappropriately.
While Adaptive partners the big enterprise security players such as Symantec, McAfee and SurfControl, the stakes are higher in the mobile space. Rather than deploying security to 50,000 users in a single corporation, mobile networks are looking to secure millions of users with a single solution and, as Maclachlan puts it, "if a decision takes more than five milliseconds you can break the network".
Adaptive's technology is deployed on the network rather than the handset. "Installing a client on a mobile is not fast enough or powerful enough," explains Maclachlan.
The average age for children in Europe to get a mobile, according to Maclachlan, is now just eight. The elephant in the room of course is that, with mobile revenues still predominantly coming from text messaging, operators are keen to tap into "adult services", ie pornography.
However they have to ensure that rock-solid policies are in place to prevent minors accessing this content - presenting a huge opportunity for Adaptive.
It's not surprising that these two former VCs have their eyes on an exit strategy already. Burke says the company will be sold in a couple of years and in the meantime the plan is to scale it as quickly as possible.
"Symantec protects about 125 million endpoints [ PCs or servers] but it took them 25 years to reach that point," says Burke. "We will have that number by the end of the year."
