"All Your Devices. Total Control. Zero Headaches." The company running the screens you tap when nobody is at the counter.
Esper's platform manages fleets of dedicated edge devices - kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, tablets, and signage - the hardware that quietly keeps retail, restaurants, and hospitals running.
Every time you tap a self-order kiosk for a burrito, sign for a package on a courier's handheld, or check in at a hotel on a lobby tablet, you are using a dedicated device - a machine built to do one job in one place. Esper builds the software that keeps thousands of those machines deployed, configured, secure, and updated. It is infrastructure most people never notice, which is exactly the point.
Founded in 2018 in Bellevue, Washington, Esper set out to solve a problem that traditional device management had largely ignored. Tools for smartphones assumed a person carrying a phone. But the tablet bolted to a wall, the POS at a checkout counter, and the scanner in a warehouse behave differently: they are company-owned, run a single application, sit in far-flung locations, and cannot afford to go dark. When one freezes, a store loses revenue by the minute. Esper's founders framed the fix in language engineers understood - "DevOps for devices" - and turned that phrase into a category.
Rather than manage a phone in someone's pocket, Esper treats a fleet of physical devices the way a software team treats a codebase: versioned configurations, staged rollouts, remote control, telemetry, and the ability to roll back a bad update before it spreads across ten thousand endpoints.
Figures compiled from company announcements and press coverage (2020-2026). Customer count reported around the 2021 Series C.
The Founders
Esper was co-founded by Yadhu Gopalan, its CEO, and Shiv Sundar, its COO. Their credibility comes from the layer of computing most companies never touch: the operating system. Gopalan most recently worked at Amazon, where he was involved in the systems behind Amazon Go and helped build FireOS on top of the Android Open Source Project. Earlier, at Microsoft, he worked on the kernel and tools for Windows CE and Windows Phone.
Sundar spent years building Android-based partnerships for companies including Samsung and Cyanogen, and helped bring Windows Phone to device makers around the world. Between them, the founders had shipped operating systems and negotiated with the hardware makers who install them - a rare combination for a device-management startup.
That background shapes the product. Esper does not simply sit on top of Android; it can reach into the OS layer, ship custom builds, and manage firmware. It is the difference between renting a device and understanding how it boots.
The Expertise
The company's depth lives in the unglamorous mechanics of the edge: provisioning devices at scale without touching each one, keeping them compliant, controlling peripherals and ports, and delivering over-the-air updates without bricking a fleet. It is the kind of expertise that only matters when something goes wrong - and is invaluable when it does.
"All Your Devices. Total Control. Zero Headaches."
Esper's platform is modular. Customers can adopt the management console, custom Android layer, provisioning automation, and OTA updates independently or together across a mixed fleet.
The cloud console to provision, configure, monitor, and secure fleets - with Blueprints for configuration management, kiosk mode, remote control, app management, telemetry, and geofencing.
A custom version of Android that gives companies OS-level control of the device experience and can extend the usable life of hardware they already own.
Zero-touch, automated setup that configures thousands of devices out of the box, cutting deployment time dramatically at scale.
A fully managed, cloud-based over-the-air update platform for Android OEMs - secure firmware delivery with no build-time integration or custom update infrastructure.
Beyond Android, the platform now manages iOS (2024), Windows (2026), and Linux devices from a single console for true mixed-fleet operations.
Programmatic control so engineering teams can automate device configuration and deployment inside their own pipelines.
Esper's customers are enterprises and device makers running large fleets of dedicated hardware. Named users span industries: Taco Bell and Snackpass in restaurants, DoorDash and SumUp and Global Payments in commerce, Intelity in hospitality, and Spire Health and Medable in healthcare, alongside hardware partners like Zebra Technologies.
The common thread is stakes. A frozen kiosk at a quick-service restaurant is lost orders. An out-of-date tablet in a clinic is a compliance risk. A courier's handheld that cannot update is a broken delivery. These are not devices you can ask an employee to reset by walking someone through settings over the phone - and historically, IT teams sometimes did exactly that, or drove store to store to reboot machines.
Esper sits in a market usually labeled Mobile Device Management, but it competes by refusing the "mobile" framing. Incumbents such as SOTI, VMware Workspace ONE, Microsoft Intune, Samsung Knox, Scalefusion, and 42Gears grew up managing employee phones. Esper's wedge is the dedicated device - single-purpose, unattended, and mission-critical - and the developer-grade tooling around it.
That focus is also its differentiation. The custom-OS capability, the pipeline-style rollouts, and the OTA firmware layer are hard to replicate for a platform built around personal devices. Where others manage what a device is allowed to do, Esper aims to manage what the device fundamentally is.
Esper sells B2B SaaS, typically priced per managed device under tiered plans, plus professional services for onboarding, custom Android builds, and OEM offerings like Airwave. Capital arrived quickly as demand for edge device management grew.
The $60M Series C was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Madrona, and Root Ventures, bringing Esper's total to roughly $100M+. At the time, the company reported more than 200 customers and said it expected revenue to quadruple that year - a fast turnaround that reflected how sharply demand for "DevOps for devices" was climbing.
Microsoft and Amazon veterans Yadhu Gopalan and Shiv Sundar start Esper to manage fleets of dedicated Android devices.
Funding to build a full-stack development and management platform for dedicated Android edge devices.
A rapid double raise - Series B in May, then a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners in October - as demand explodes.
The next-gen platform extends to manage iOS devices alongside Android.
Windows support enables mixed-fleet management, Esper makes Inc.'s fastest-growing list, and the Airwave OTA platform launches for Android OEMs.
Esper provides a cloud platform to deploy, configure, secure, monitor, and update fleets of dedicated devices - kiosks, POS systems, tablets, rugged handhelds, and signage - across Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux.
Esper was founded in 2018 by Yadhu Gopalan (CEO) and Shiv Sundar (COO), engineers who previously worked on operating systems and edge systems at Microsoft and Amazon.
Traditional MDM was built for personal phones. Esper focuses on dedicated, company-owned devices and adds software-development discipline: pipelines, custom Android builds via Esper Foundation, staged rollouts, rollbacks, and OTA firmware updates.
Enterprises and OEMs in retail, restaurants, hospitality, healthcare, logistics, and education. Named customers include Taco Bell, DoorDash, Intelity, and Spire Health.
Roughly $100M+ in total, including a $7.6M Series A (2020), a $30M Series B (2021), and a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners (2021).