In a Series A funding round led by US-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group, Esper has raised $7.6 Million. Madrona Venture Group is well known as an investor in Amazon’s Series A round in 1995. The round also saw participation from their existing seed investors – Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Haystack Ventures, and Pathbreaker Ventures.
Esper is an intelligent cloud platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale Android dedicated devices and manage applications and devices in real-time. Their full-stack solution enables enterprises to efficiently develop, manage and monitor these devices securely across different versions of Android and device types. Esper has a large customer base in the US and India. The funding will be utilised for product development and to expand its customer base in India and the United States.
“We are excited to have the full support of these investors to expand our team and further scale our business to help customers move beyond Mobile Device Management into true device orchestration. Our vision is to provide a platform that allows our customers to focus on building their value proposition rather than their infrastructure,” said Yadhu Gopalan, Co-Founder, and CEO, Esper.
Android devices are at the forefront of Digital Transformation
Android-based devices such as tablets, point-of-sale devices, mobile payment devices, and kiosks are rapidly proliferating in the market and have become commonplace to consumers. India represents a strong market for these devices with over 97% of devices deployed using the Android operating system. These include tablets in cabs, biometric devices, POS, delivery and logistics devices.
“India has been an early adopter of Android devices for enterprise use cases, we have some leading POS, logistics, and retail customers in India who are using Esper to deploy their device fleet. We look forward to utilizing our Series A fundraise to grow our India market share and expand our engineering team in Bengaluru.” adds Shiv Sundar, Co-Founder, and COO, Esper.
Esper’s customer base in India includes leading enterprises from Retail, Logistics, Hospitality and Healthcare industries. Esper also has ongoing partnerships with MediaTek, Lenovo, and Zebra for hardware development and devices. Besides this, Esper is also Android Enterprise Recommended as a Google EMM partner.
By applying Esper’s intense customer focus, the founders identified the huge unmet need for effective device and app management in the Android dedicated device segment. The many customer pain points were poorly addressed by existing systems, typical leaving developers and Android firmware out of their solutions. In 2019 Esper set off on implementing a full-stack approach for customers building, deploying, and maintaining Android-based solutions all the way from offering Esper Enhanced Android, a full developer toolchain, and addressing the table stakes of application and device management honed to the unique market needs. This view and vision were made possible by the unique experiences of the founders including building the Windows CE kernel at Microsoft, working with and for major players in the Android market including Samsung, Huawei, and Cyanogen, and leading Android-based solutions for Amazon.
Esper’s growing team in Bengaluru is set to expand across engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success. The company’s unique culture focused on melding software and devices to impact and improve the human experience worldwide through intense customer focus has resulted in low turnover and high satisfaction. Yet the company prides itself on a cordial environment in a casual but intense atmosphere. Esper is the place to be for the highest caliber personnel in the Android industry.
