Friday, June 24, 2011

Mobiquity eyes 150% growth in staff for 2011

By Kyle Alspach

Mobiquity Inc., a new firm focused on developing custom mobile technology for large companies, plans to grow its staff to 100 by the end of the year up from 40 currently, CEO Bill Seibel said in an interview Friday.

The company officially launched in March with a $5 million Series A round from Longworth Venture Partners of Waltham and Sigma Partners of Boston, and has been hiring rapidly, Seibel said. The company currently has 32 staffers in Massachusetts at offices in Marlborough, and the Bay State team will likely grow to 65 by year’s end, he said. Mobiquity is also planning to move its headquarters soon to a new location in either the Dedham or Wellesley area, which Seibel said should be finalized within weeks.

Seibel — a serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures have included co-founding IT consultancy Cambridge Technology Partners — said he began researching the idea for the new company in October.

“It became really clear to me that mobile was front and center on the radar screens of all executives, but there really wasn’t anything in the indsutry that was addressing the issues they had with getting started with it,” he said.

Mobiquity expects about 80 percent of its business will be for Fortune 2000 companies, Seibel said.
Those companies are increasingly looking to see how they can use mobile to improve their business practices, both in terms of connecting with customers and supporting internal processes, he said.

Mobiquity offers services for every aspect of rolling out mobile for companies, from helping to craft a mobile strategy for the business through development and deployment of the mobile technology for the company, Seibel said. Mobiquity also offers data and analytics services, along with mobile security services, he said.

Seibel co-founded Mobiquity with Scott Snyder, former CEO of Decision Strategies International, and brought a number of highly-credentialed mobile experts onto the team. They include Jonathan Stark, author of books on building iPhone and Android apps, who is Mobiquity’s vice president of application architecture, and Joel Evans, former CEO of Cronk Software, who is Mobiquity’s vice president of application development.

Most of the new hires have been made since the March fundraising, Seibel said. “It came together remarkably quickly,” he said.

Mobiquity has also closed seven deals with customers since March, one of which should be disclosed soon, Seibel said.