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The funding was led by Atlas Venture with participation from other existing investors Citrix, IVC and Consolidated Investment Group, and takes the total raised by Gizmox to $18 million. As part of the deal, Jeff Fagnan and Christopher Lynch at Atlas Venture are joining Gizmox’s board.
With this, the company’s second round of funding (“you could call it a Series B” said Kuznetsov in an interview), Gizmox is looking build on the groundwork established by Navot Peled, the founder who had been CEO but is now shifting to hold the title of president.
Kuznetsov has cut his teeth both at large corporates and as a successful entrepreneur himself. After time spent at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer among other things, he left to start his own enterprise software company, DataPower, which was eventually sold to IBM, where he stayed on for 2.5 years integrating and developing the business, before leaving to start a new company, online privacy company Abine, where he remains as chairman. Atlas, which had invested both in DataPower and Abine, likely had a role in putting Kuznetsov into the new position.
So where is the opportunity for consumer-challenged HTML5 with enterprises? As Kuznetsov describes it, not only is it impractical for enterprises to use native platforms for the job, but it’s unnecessary.
“I think that the challenge for businesses is somewhat different than it is for consumers,” he said of the reason for opting for HTML5 when you are an enterprise. “Businesses today have rich complex client-server applications. These are things that you and I would never see unless we worked for Fortune 500 enterprises. They are very complex, with interfaces built over 20 years. Now there is pressure for those to work on iPads and other devices.
“But in many cases you cannot re-write those in ios or C#. It has to be something that is open and standard. Native apps are not really an option for these enterprises because the software they have is too complex and they have to support a broad range of devices and has to be something standard. HTML5 works great for this.”
He contrasts this to the priorities for consumer apps, with their 3D graphics, or accelerometers.
“HTML5 works here because these are not games. This is not Angry Birds. It’s graphs and lots of data,” he notes, adding that the complexity instead comes in the forms of security and multiple interfaces — two areas where HTML5 works well.
Current customers of Gizmox’s are in the large enterprise space and include names like Visa, Daimler and Bezeq Telecom, who have to date used the platform not only to build apps but more significantly use it to translate existing IT apps into the mobile environment. The idea, Kuznetsov says, is to expand that list of customers, and this is where the bulk of the investment will go.
As for competitors, “I don’t think anyone does exactly what we do,” Kuznetsov says, but he notes also that companies like Appcelerator have promoted the idea that the issue of mobilizing IT apps can be solved with native platforms; while Sencha covers “some aspects” of the same areas that Gizmox does.
In that vein, to better compete, it might not be strange to see Gizmox fill out and develop its product in areas like further security and performance management services for the apps once they have made it to Gizmox’s platform.
