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Friday, February 19, 2010
Growney balances Rudyard VC role with two wireless CEO positions
By Rodney H. Brown
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There is an old mill complex on a bend in the Assabet River in Concord that is the home for two technology companies and one investment firm and they all share one person — former Motorola Ventures director Matthew Growney, who wasted no time after leaving the corporate investment arm in finding not one but a pair of interesting technology plays.
The two companies in question — Illume Software Inc. and Isabella Products Inc. — are getting access to Growney’s expertise developed from his years at the Lexington venture arm of giant Motorola Inc. Growney also has equity interest in each company.
Illume is making software called iZUP, which uses GPS technology to keep a teenager’s cell phone from making or receiving calls or texts while driving a car. Isabella, in contrast, makes a type of digital photo frame on steroids called Vizit. They both rely heavily on wireless technology, and that puts both of them in Growney’s wheelhouse.
Growney left Motorola Ventures, which he co-founded in 2006, because he was looking to experience things from the more flexible world of venture capital.
“Although you learn a ton at corporate, it is corporate,” he said. Growney also wanted to get his hands dirty in an operations role and worked for a while for Dextrys Inc. of Wakefield. He then decided to start Rudyard Partners in January 2008 with a focus on consumer technology. Just one month later Rudyard launched its first company, Isabella, with Growney as CEO, a position he still holds.
Vizit allows someone to add images and update information to the frame wirelessly across the Web. At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Vizit impressed the organizers enough to win the Best Embedded Mobile Device Award.
Isabella has already landed a partnership with AT&T Inc. and the Vizit will be available in March. Growney sees it reaching a market different than the usual business user of the smart phones AT&T primarily sells bundled with its data plans.
“It’s meant for a group of people who are not necessarily tech-savvy,” Growney said.
Illume Software, in contrast to Isabella, was an existing company that approached Growney in the fall of 2008 and asked him to join the board. The company’s investors — Illume had raised “several million” dollars in angel funds, Growney said — asked him to move it into Rudyard in Concord, take over as CEO and completely revamp the go-to-market strategy.
Illume’s iZUP application is available as a download for Windows Mobile, RIM Blackberry and Android-based smartphones, and the service can be paid either monthly or annually and tops out at $79.95 per year for a family plan.
To help him quickly move iZUP to market, Growney brought on board technology veteran Mark Thirman to server as vice president of business development. Growney and Thirman knew each other from Growney’s investment while at Motorola Ventures in Thirman’s last startup, AirPrint Networks Inc. Thirman previously worked for Pingtel Corp. and PictureTel Corp.
The business potential of Illume’s product was matched by its social potential, Thirman said, and that was attractive to him.
“I look at this as a really cool idea,” he said. “It is not just about self-interest or greed.”
The need for such an app is out there, Thirman said, citing a National Highway Transportation Safety Administration study that showed 6,000 deaths annually on the roads can be directly attributed to cell phone use.
In January, Growney stepped aside as CEO and brought on board Daniel Ross, who had served as managing partner of Boston private equity firm Maxis Capital.
“Matthew and I have been business partners over a number of years in a number of different business opportunities,” Ross said. His background also includes being an Entrepreneur in Residence at GrandBanks Capital, and was a member of investor group CommonAngels.
Ross said he took the offer to join the 25-person Illume because he liked both the challenge and the opportunity.
“The marketplace is at a beautiful state of inflection where it is moving very rapidly,” he said. “The challenge for us to get the right product into the market at the right time.”
That timing may be on the mark, according to Thirman. He is in meetings regularly with insurance companies to see if they will offer a discount to family plans if the policy holders adopt iZUP or similar technology. And the application may not have to be a download soon. AT&T Inc. has put iZUP into its app beta site in which a select pool of 15,000 real AT&T customers try out new apps and help AT&T decide which ones might wind up on the deck of certain phones.
Thirman said iZUP is one of just two call restriction applications that made it into the beta site. And already he has seen a 12 percent purchase rate from those users that have clicked on the link, far above the industry standard of 2 to 3 percent, Thirman said.
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