Rapid Growth and Funding Round Fuels PowWow Mobile Appointment of New Leadership

Kia Behnia, former CTO of BMC Software, joins as CEO and secures $4.25 million investment

San Francisco – May 4, 2016 – PowWow Mobile, the leader in enterprise app mobility, today announced $4.25 million in funding and several new executive hires. The funding round was led by Vertical Venture Partners, and includes participation from IT-Farm, OurCrowd, Prabhakar Goel and VKRN. PowWow will use the new funds to accelerate product and company growth through sales and marketing. Joining the company is Kia Behnia as CEO, Marco Bussadori as senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, and Ravinder Braich as vice president of product management.
PowWow Mobile provides software solutions to organizations across multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, telecom, high-tech, consulting and public sector to modernize their application portfolio. In the past year, PowWow has focused on building out its leadership bench and customer base, while continuing to refine its technology and product offerings. Highlights include:

• In the second half of 2015, bookings grew by 200 percent over the first half of the year and over 400 percent over 2014.
• Key competitive wins across multiple industries and geographies.
• Release of PowWow’s mobile platform offering, which received the 2015 Citrix Synergy’s Best of Show.

Additionally, PowWow has assembled a team of technology and business innovators with extensive experience in high growth startups and leading technology enterprises. Co-founder and former PowWow Mobile CEO Andrew Cohen will serve as chief customer officer. Co-founder Jonathan Kaplan serves as chief technology officer.
CEO Kia Behnia has more than 20 years of industry experience in mobility and digital transformation, and most recently served as a board member of PowWow Mobile. Prior to joining PowWow Mobile, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at BMC for a decade, where he led strategy for all products including enterprise mobility, datacenter automation and hybrid-cloud management.

“Almost every business today is experiencing a fundamental problem: In the post-PC era, organizations across many industries are looking to mobilize and modernize all of their business applications, yet the cost and complexity of mobile development is overwhelming. I joined PowWow because they have a disruptive and highly differentiated solution to address this problem,” said Behnia, CEO of PowWow Mobile.

“Most organizations have only a handful of applications mobilized out of the hundreds of Web and desktop-based applications in their portfolio. Mobilizing the workforce is the most critical part of an organization’s digital transformation, but time and cost overruns have hampered businesses from achieving success at scale. With our technology we can modernize and mobilize apps in days for a fraction of the cost of re-writing applications and the accompanying costly upgrades.” SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing Marco Bussadori joins from BMC Software and previously held positions at successful growth companies such as Tivoli, NetIQ, Marimba, Microsoft, Configuresoft, Opsware and BigFix, many of which were acquired by tech leaders like IBM, VMware and HP. He holds an honor’s degree in artificial intelligence and advanced computer science from Middlesex University of London. VP of Product Management Ravinder Braich joins from Citrix Systems, where he held positions as the senior director of product management as well as director of solutions engineering. Prior to Citrix, he held senior sales engineering roles at Octane (acquired
by Epiphany) and Intrepid (acquired by PeopleSoft).

By the end of 2017, Gartner predicts market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them. To meet this need, PowWow’s technology allows enterprises to quickly transform business applications into modern, mobile app experiences. Announced today, the company’s new platform, PowWow SmartUX™, allows enterprises to create new or modernize existing web and Windows applications more efficiently and cheaper than re-development, without requiring extensive coding or expensive developer resources.

“Mobility has become the competitive advantage for leading companies across multiple industries. This drives the need for rapid mobile transformation as businesses simply can’t keep up with the demand for mobile-ready applications,” said Dave Schwab, founder and managing director at Vertical Venture Partners. “We are excited to lead the investment to fuel PowWow’s continued innovation and go-to-market expansion. Kia and the management team have the experience to take the company to the next level of growth and scale.”

About PowWow Mobile
PowWow Mobile allows enterprises to transform business applications into modern, mobile app experiences. PowWow eliminates business-IT friction as enterprises seek competitive advantage and increased productivity through mobile for today’s digital workplace. PowWow’s SmartUX accelerates enterprise application transformation by creating new, native mobile apps from any web or Windows app, quickly without sacrificing quality, and at a lower cost than custom solutions or other tools. PowWow works with customers across industries, including financial services, healthcare, telecom, software, consulting and public sector. PowWow Mobile is based in San Francisco. Learn more at www.powwowmobile.com.