Contact: Ben Kolada, Chris Hazelton
AirWatch, considered one of the largest mobile device management (MDM) vendors, has raised $200m in its first round of outside funding. Insight Venture Partners led the round. This round of funding will build on several hundred million dollars the company has already invested in its MDM products and now-growing focus on mobile application deployment and management.
Terms of the investment weren’t disclosed, but we’re told the funding round values AirWatch at a whopping $1bn, which no doubt restricts its options in terms of an exit. The largest MDM acquisition we’ve seen so far was Citrix’s takeout of Zenprise for $327m. Zenprise had raised a total of $79m.
The investment will be used to increase staff in Asia as the company looks to build on 2012 revenue of nearly $100m, expanding on earlier international growth. Specifically, AirWatch says the funding will be used for product development and strategic M&A. The latter is particularly noteworthy, since the company has so far focused solely on organic growth, and hasn’t announced a single acquisition since its founding in 2003.
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