Esper, a Seattle-based startup providing DevOps platform for customers that manage fleets of company-owned Android devices, announced that it has raised $7.6 million Series A investment round led by Amazon and Madrona Venture Group. Existing seed investors including Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Haystack Ventures, and Pathbreaker Ventures also participated in the Series A round. Till now the company has raised a total of $10.5 million.
Esper CEO and co-founder Yadhu Gopalan is a 19-year Microsoft veteran, who led development of Windows CE and Windows Phone. Gopalan left Microsoft in 2013 for Amazon, where he built back-end technology for Amazon Go, FireOS, and AWS before launching Esper.
Terry Myerson, previously an executive vice president at Microsoft within the Windows and Devices Group, worked alongside both Gopalan and Sundar at the Redmond, Wash. tech giant. Myerson is now a board observer for Esper; Madrona Managing Director Tim Porter is a board member.
“I wanted to solve a problem that I kept solving at these big companies: how do we treat these smart edge devices more like servers?” Gopalan said.The company has about 30 employees at offices in Bellevue, Wash., the Bay Area, and India. Gopalan added: Esper is a step above “MDM,” or traditional mobile device management tools sold by companies such as VMWare. “In a way we are the anti-MDM for these devices,” he said.
Deploying, monitoring and maintaining remote devices is a huge issue in the enterprise — everything from the bespoke point of sale tablets to exercise equipment run on Android,” Terry Myerson, venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, said in a statement. “And there is currently no system to easily develop, update or even know when devices are malfunctioning.”
The company was founded in 2018. Esper helps clients with development, deployment, and maintenance of devices and kiosks used across industries such as retail, logistics, transportation, and more.
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