MokiMobility Raises $2M In Seed Funding For Mobile Device Management, Partners With Revel Systems

Salt Lake City-based MokiMobility announced a $2 million seed funding round, just a little over a year after the cloud-based mobile device management was officially founded. MokiMobility has since shifted focus from a broad-based MDM approach to one tailored specifically towards single-purpose devices, like the iPads you’ll often see installed as ordering kiosks in restaurants, or used as point-of-sale terminals at stores, which is why their partnership with SF-based Revel is also big news.

MokiMobility’s new investment round is led by Epic Ventures, and includes Allegis Capital partner Spencer Tall and Fusion-IO’s Tyler Smith. MokiMobility CEO Tom Karren explained in an interview that there’s a growing demand for MDM that specifically addresses the kinds of deployments of tablets like the iPad, as well as Android hardware, which are being used in customer-facing applications in stores and businesses. It’s a different problem to tackle vs. provisioning devices for a sales team or enterprise staff, he says, and one that deserves a dedicated approach.

“There’s a huge disruption going on right now, we call it the second wave of mobile adoption,” Smith said. “Obviously with the first wave, everyone wanted to get their hands on mobile devices and take them to work. Now what we’re seeing is that companies are trying to put these devices to work for commercial purposes. They’re putting them in as kiosks, as retail enablement, as point-of-sale and self-checkout.”

That has resulted in a lot of growth opportunity for MokiMobility, particularly now as more businesses are getting into those kinds of deployments. Smith said that recently, they’ve seen an uptick in interest in this kind of product from businesses, and that makes sense given the trajectory so far of their new partner Revel Systems.

Revel, which creates iPad POS deployments aimed at restaurants and retail stores, will now be integrating MokiMobility’s MokiManage platform into its product, which has the advantage of building in an MDM solution for multiple device deployments, and also of making Revel’s offerings even more PCI compliant, since MokiMobility’s security standards are current with guidelines just released in February. This helps Revel and its customers get ahead of the game in terms of PCI compliance, since what is originally released as a guideline often becomes a mandatory standard down the road.

Hitching its wagon to the Revel Systems rising star is a great move on the part of MokiMobility, and both of these companies are definitely ones to watch as more businesses adopt self-checkout and move to iPads and Android tablets for in-store sales assistance.