Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Pitch
Startup mtiks aims to quash mobile app piracy
By Lynette F. Cornell
UMass President Jack Wilson on Entrepreneurship
Health care industry eyes iPad
mtiks LLC
Headquarters: Andover
Phone: 978-495-0931
Email: muthu@mtiks.com
URL: www.mtiks.com
Founders: Muthu Arumugam, Shiva Subramanian, Stephen Schmill
Year founded: 2010
Employees: 5
The Pitch: $300,000
In the company’s own words:
“Mobile apps are the recent trend in the industry. App users benefit with innovative apps and games. App developers benefit with the new way to make money. At the same time, mobile app piracy is also going up.
Jailbroken phones are common in Apple’s iPhone market and hackers provide an easy way for an average user to download a paid app for free. Approximately 30 percent of the revenue [generated by mobile application sales] is lost through piracy. Mtiks helps mobile app developers to reach those customers and ask them to pay.
Mtiks is the only solution in the market to offer anti-piracy and conversion measure for the exploding mobile app development market. Mtiks founders came from mobile app development background and worked with various mobile analytics frameworks, which bring a very valuable solution to the market. Mtiks has a scalable and complete product already and helping its private beta customers already. Mtiks is looking forward to opening it up for public beta during summer of 2010 when the investors bring a talented team of marketing and sales. Mtiks is also looking at Android and other platforms to offer the same services and be the global leader in mobile app anti-piracy.”
Background:
Initially, the company also developed mobile applications but decided to focus solely on antipiracy, because of the high levels of competition they faced in application development. Mtiks has received $12,000 in seed funding from a local investor for initial development efforts.
The people behind the company:
The company was founded by Muthu Arumugam, CEO, Shiva Subramanian, vice president of marketing and sales and Stephen Schmill, user interface lead. Both Arumugam and Subramanian are also co-founders of Abhav LLC, a company that develops mobile phone applications. Venkata Majeti serves as an advisor to the company.
The technology:
Mtiks provides a small library for developers to integrate into their paid applications. Once the application is pirated, mtiks offers the developer the abiliy to show a popup with a custom message and actions, such as “evaluate” or “buy now” for pirated application users to choose. This popup can be turned on and off anytime by the developer. Mtiks is currently in private beta and has about 10 customers using its product. Arumugam said he expects increased interest in his product from the recent decision by the U.S. Copyright Office, deeming the jailbreaking of iPhones to be legal. The high selling developers, said Arumugam, are approaching mtiks in response to the decision, and he expects smaller developers to contact him once they start experiencing piracy of their applications.
The pitch:
The company is seeking $300,000 for marketing and team development to reach out to companies and individual developers. It would also use the funding for adding support for Android platform expansion. They predict a $150 million market for antipiracy software for mobile applications. Arumugam said they have no competitors nor business partners thus far and no plans to form any partnerships.
"The Pitch" takes a look at a company, its executives and its technology-related business plan. To nominate your company for The Pitch section of Mass High Tech, please fill out the submission form.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
