Desktop virtualisation startup WorldDesk has raised $1.25 million in new funding, in what is effectively a follow-on round from existing backers Lough Shore Investments, the Belfast-based angel investment firm, and a number of unnamed California and New York-based angels.
The Northern Irish-founded, now Menlo Park, California-based company says the additional capital will be used to bolster engineering and sales in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Notably, however, it isn’t disclosing the total amount of funding raised to date.
Today’s funding news also coincides with what WordDesk is describing as a “significant overhaul” of its free ‘WorldDesk for You’ consumer offering. The virtual desktop, which utilises virtualisation technology to enable a user to take not only their files but also their apps and desktop profile from one Windows PC to another, has been given a completely new User Interface, faster boot time and other performance improvements, and perhaps most significantly, support for new applications.
These include Google’s Chrome browser, Skype for both voice and video calls, and Amazon’s Kindle e-Reader software — three apps that are likely to be high on a user’s wish list. The ability to take your apps and files with you falls down if your day-to-day wares aren’t supported.
To that end, WorldDesk enables users to store and carry their virtual desktop, apps and files via a USB drive, or even a smartphone or iPod with support for Mass Storage mode. The platform also enables access via the cloud, courtesy of collaborations with Dropbox and Box announced in February and June 2012, respectively.
As well as its free consumer offering, which presumably acts as a shop window and testbed for its technology, the company sells into the Enterprise Desktop Virtualization space. Its paid-for ‘WorldDesk for Enterprise’ uses the same core technology that powers ‘WorldDesk for You’ but also has a range of additional features to support and manage the creation and deployment of virtual desktops in the enterprise.