Investors can’t seem to get enough of the BYOD trend of late. Today sees another ‘bring your own device’ startup receive funding — Tel Aviv-based Cellrox, which claims to be a leader in BYOD ‘multi-persona’ solutions for mobile devices, has raised a $4.7 million series A round led by Runa Capital, with participation from existing investors Previz Venture Partners, Columbia Technology Ventures, and others.
The company’s previous funding is undisclosed so it’s hard to peg the total amount raised to date (though we can probably add just a few hundred thousand), while Cellrox says the new capital will be used to “extend its collaboration with OEMs and operators for installation in tier-one enterprises around the world”.
Like other companies in the space, Cellrox’s solution helps corporations manage the increasingly diverse portfolio of devices being pushed inside their walls via workers bringing their own device, in this case smartphones and tablets, therefore displacing the top-down prescriptive IT department model of yesteryear — see Forrester’s recent report on mobile adoption in the enterprise which found that 66 percent of employees now use two or more devices every day, including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets.
Specifically, Cellrox’s technology employs virtualization to let employees and corporations share a single fully functional mobile device without compromising security, performance or user experience. It does this by supporting two or more separate and complete OS installations on a single Android device, therefore creating what the company claims is an “impenetrable wall between the employee’s applications and the company’s data and applications”. It dubs this one phone with two or more “personas” which can be switched with a single swipe. Cellrox says that it’s this virtualization approach that sets it apart from other BYOD-management players.
In a statement, Omer Eiferman, CEO of Cellrox, talks up the BYOD opportunity for the company in 2013, citing an “increased focus on mobile vulnerabilities, employee privacy and device performance”.
Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner at Runa Capital, which has a specialism of investing in virtualization, cloud and mobile companies, notes in a statement that “the future for mobile virtualization is even broader compared to servers and desktop virtualization”.
Cellrox was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.