Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you foresee consumer smartphones using your technology or do you foresee handset vendors catering to the consumer market building your chips into the devices? Is that how you see the market evolving?

Gregg Smith: Certainly, that’s how we want to see the market evolve overtime. One thing that we were able to do because of Mr. Snowden and the press that he generated was do a lot of mainstream media. We did a lot of television in the USA today. One of the things that proves to me is that there are consumers interested in talking securely and text messaging securely. That’s an area we’ll start to concentrate on more in 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask my question again. How do you go to market in that scenario? Do you do deals with device manufacturers who will build you into their design specs?

Gregg Smith: We work with a number of the device manufacturers including Samsung. The answer to that is we go to market on a variety of different ways to touch enterprise, government, and down the road, the consumers. It’ll be a combination of the OEM. It’ll be the carriers. There might be some partners that focus on that as well.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little about the company. You said the company has been around since 2003. Where are you located?

Gregg Smith: We’re located just out of Washington D.C. beside Maryland. We have offices in Seoul and the Middle East. We have another development office up in Baltimore.

Sramana Mitra: What is the history of the company? How was the company built? Is it a venture funded or bootstrapped company?

Gregg Smith: It was bootstrapped initially. We took money from the New York Angels. Since 2006, we have been funded by two venture funds, TWJ Capital of Connecticut and Security Growth Partners of New York.

Sramana Mitra: How much money have you raised?

Gregg Smith: We have raised over $40 million.

Sramana Mitra: I think I have got the nuggets that are part of the TLMS story. Is there anything else you want to add?

Gregg Smith: The only thing I was going to add is that we have 18 granted patents and we have a pipeline of 38 pending patents.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you so much for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith
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