device-management
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Aferian kept the video running. Its own money ran out.
Aferian built the technology behind streaming apps and thousands of managed screens. Its March 2026 collapse left Amino and 24i operating under new ownership - and shareholders with no return from the sale.
Eseye Starts Where Most IoT Plans Go Wrong: Inside the Device
The British connectivity specialist sells a useful heresy: when an IoT project keeps dropping offline, the carrier may not be the first thing to blame. Eseye begins with the hardware, then makes hundreds of mobile networks behave like one managed system.
The Remote-Control Company That Never Left the Classroom
NetSupport began with a modem, a distant PC and a motorway journey nobody wanted to make. Thirty-seven years later, the British software maker still sells the same practical promise: see the problem, reach the machine and put the human back in control.
classroom.cloud Turns the School Screen Into a Safeguarding Signal
A British software veteran took three awkward school jobs - teaching, device support and online safety - and put them in one browser tab. The clever part is not watching screens; it is deciding which signals deserve a human response.
Rippling Wants One Employee Record to Run the Whole Company
The $16.8 billion software company started with onboarding and kept going - into payroll, laptops, app access, corporate cards, compliance, and AI. The wager is simple: if worker data is clean, the back office can finally stop copying and pasting.
JumpCloud Put the Company Directory in the Cloud. Now It Wants the Whole IT Stack.
JumpCloud began by automating access to servers. The bigger business appeared when its founders realized the directory - the dull, indispensable list behind every login - could become the control plane for modern work.
Inseego Sold the Fleet Business to Save the Hotspot - Now It Wants to Run the Wireless Edge
The company behind MiFi escaped a debt squeeze by selling telematics for $52.7 million and narrowing its bet to 5G hardware plus cloud software. The turnaround offers a practical lesson in focus - and a warning about betting too heavily on a few giant carriers.
Omer Brookstein Is Teaching the Machines in the Meeting Room to Phone Home
He started programming control systems at 14, learned the AV trade inside the family business, and built Xyte after a pandemic wrecked the original plan. Now his bet is that the quiet machines around us should behave less like furniture and more like software.
Blues Put 10 Years of Connectivity in a Tiny Card - So Hardware Teams Can Skip the Telecom Homework
Ray Ozzie’s latest company turns the messiest parts of industrial IoT into a small module and a JSON request. The payoff is speed; the tradeoff is that Blues works best when machines whisper useful data, not when they stream the world.
DataLocker Put a Panic Room Inside a Hard Drive - Then Built the Control Tower Around It
The Kansas security company learned that encrypting a drive was only half the job. The bigger business is helping governments and enterprises control what happens after the USB stick walks out the door.
Rippling Wants the Whole Company. Gusto Starts With Payroll
The familiar payroll comparison misses the real choice. Rippling is built to make one employee record run HR, IT, and finance, while Gusto keeps its attention on the small-business people stack.
The Company That Fixes 1,700 Schools' Broken Chromebooks - And Gives Away the Software to Track Them
A cell-phone repair guy noticed schools kept bringing him broken Chromebooks. A decade later he runs device repair, buyback, and free tracking software for 1,700+ districts.
The Tiny Wireless Company That Turned Trail Cameras Into Subscriptions
Zipit began with a pocket messenger for teenagers. Two decades later, it runs the unglamorous machinery that lets manufacturers connect devices, collect payments, and build recurring revenue around hardware.
The Checkout Terminal Is Becoming a Cloud Platform
Ingenico built its name on the machine beside the cash register. Now it is turning tens of millions of payment devices into a managed network for software, services and new ways to pay.
Verifone
The card reader on the counter is only the visible tip. Verifone is rebuilding its four-decade hardware franchise as a software-connected payments grid for merchants that need every channel, processor and checkout to behave like one system.
Ayla Networks
The smartest thing in a connected appliance may be the infrastructure its owner never sees. Ayla Networks supplies that hidden stack - from firmware to cloud to app - for brands that want the benefits of IoT without surrendering the customer relationship.
AIRLINQ
The connected world runs on a mess of SIMs, carriers, invoices and national rules. AIRLINQ wants to turn that mess into one control panel - and make every connected car, meter and machine easier to operate as a business.
Aeris
Aeris spent three decades making machines talk over cellular networks. Now, with 104 million devices in its orbit, it wants to make sure nobody dangerous is listening - or speaking back.
Ivanti
Inside the Utah software company that quietly runs the plumbing behind millions of corporate laptops and phones - and learned the hard way what happens when the plumbing springs a leak.
Wiseasy
Wiseasy is a Singapore-headquartered payment technology company that builds smart Android payment terminals, cloud device-management software, and payment gateways under an integrated 'Cloud + Software + Terminals' model. Founded in 2012 by Yan Li, it serves banks, payment service providers, fintechs, and mobile operators across roughly 114 countries and regions, and in 2024 raised a Series C led by Qualcomm Ventures while launching 'pi' (π), an on-device AI POS terminal built on the Qualcomm QCS6490 chipset.
Automox
Automox is a cloud-native IT automation and endpoint management company that helps organizations patch, configure, and secure Windows, macOS, and Linux devices from a single platform. Founded in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, its agent-based, server-free approach automates patch management and vulnerability remediation across distributed fleets, and its Otto generative-AI assistant lets IT teams build automation scripts (Worklets) in plain language. The company serves more than 1,500 customers across 30-plus countries and has raised roughly $154 million, including a $110 million Series C led by Insight Partners in 2021.
Esper
Esper is a Bellevue, Washington software company that builds an enterprise-scale device management platform for dedicated edge hardware - the point-of-sale systems, kiosks, tablets, rugged handhelds, and digital signage that run modern retail, restaurants, healthcare, and logistics. Founded in 2018 by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers, Esper pitched itself early as 'DevOps for devices,' bringing pipelines, remote control, custom Android builds, and over-the-air updates to fleets that traditional mobile device management tools struggle to handle. The company has raised roughly $100M+ across Series A through C and manages devices for customers including Taco Bell, DoorDash, Intelity, and Spire Health.
DTEN
DTEN is a San Jose-based hardware company that builds all-in-one video conferencing and collaboration devices for hybrid workplaces, schools, and healthcare. Founded in 2015 by Wei Liu and closely tied to Zoom, DTEN pioneered the all-in-one touchscreen meeting appliance with its D5 and D7 lines and today ships AI-enhanced systems certified for both Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms, combining 4K cameras, microphone arrays, touch whiteboarding, and cloud device management in a plug-and-play package.
Xyte
Xyte is a cloud platform that lets hardware manufacturers, system integrators, and enterprises connect, monitor, service, and commercialize their connected devices from a single place. Its Xyte Device Cloud (also branded as a Connected Device Management Platform) turns physical products into software-driven, subscription-ready services - handling everything from remote monitoring and firmware updates to billing and AI-assisted support. Founded in 2019 by AV-industry veteran Omer Brookstein and software builder Boris Dinkevich, Xyte works with manufacturers across pro AV, unified communications, smart buildings, medical, and robotics, including names like Crestron, Legrand, Poly, QSC, Biamp, and Panasonic.
Vishal Modi
Vishal Modi is the founder and CEO of Spoonified, a Dallas-area startup building what it calls the world's first intelligent utensil - AI-enabled forks and spoons that identify food, measure portion sizes, and track how fast you eat to automate nutrition logging for chronic-care programs. He spent nearly two decades shipping consumer hardware before this: launching Google Nexus and Moto G phones at Motorola, running Chrome OS and tablet product operations at Lenovo, and building business development and partnerships at edge-device-management company Esper. A Kellogg MBA and computer engineer, he started Spoonified in 2021 after his own struggle with weight management convinced him that the hard part of nutrition tracking is the very first step - getting the data off the plate.
Omnissa
Omnissa is an independent digital work platform company spun out of VMware's End-User Computing business after KKR's roughly $4 billion acquisition closed on July 1, 2024. Led by CEO Shankar Iyer, it builds the autonomous workspace: a unified platform spanning Workspace ONE (unified endpoint management), Omnissa Horizon (virtual desktops and apps / DaaS), and Omnissa Intelligence (analytics and digital employee experience), increasingly stitched together with trusted, AI-driven automation. The company serves more than 26,000 customers worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 500, with about $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue and roughly 4,000 employees.
signageOS
signageOS is the hardware-agnostic operating layer for the world's digital signage networks. Born in Prague in 2016 from a frustration with proprietary device chaos, it gives developers a single set of APIs to write one HTML5 app and deploy it across 50+ signage platforms - Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, BrightSign, ChromeOS and the rest - while ops teams remotely monitor, troubleshoot and update every screen from one cloud console.
John Grady
John Grady is the CEO of Ayla Networks, a San Jose-based IoT and smart home software platform that powers over 15 million connected devices and 250 billion annual transactions for brands like SharkNinja, De'Longhi, Canadian Tire, and Schneider Electric. A Boston College and Indiana University Kelley School of Business graduate with 20+ years in technology sales and operations, Grady rose through roles at Brown Brothers Harriman, Covad Communications, Pace PLC, ChargePoint, and Solar Mosaic before joining Ayla in January 2022 as Head of Global Sales and ascending to CEO in 2024. Under his leadership, Ayla was ranked the #1 US-based Smart Home Platform by ABI Research and announced a major Google Cloud partnership in April 2025.
Stan Richter
Stan Richter is co-founder and CEO of signageOS, the company that built a unification layer between digital signage hardware and the CMS platforms that run on top of it. Founded in Prague in 2016, signageOS solves the fragmentation problem that has plagued digital signage for decades - dozens of SoC operating systems, dozens of manufacturers, no common API. Richter turned that chaos into a business, bootstrapped growth to global scale, raised $4.2M from Reflex Capital, relocated to San Francisco, won the 2025 Outstanding Individual award at the Global Digital Signage Awards, and in January 2026 unveiled Supra - an encrypted edge-streaming platform that extends the usable life of existing hardware by two to five years.
Luke Wilson
Luke Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of ManageXR, the leading device management platform for enterprise XR (extended reality) deployments. A Stanford computer science graduate who designed and taught one of the university's first VR development courses as an undergraduate, Wilson built ManageXR out of a real operational problem: while deploying thousands of VR headsets to children's hospitals across the United States through his earlier venture Mighty Immersion, he found no viable management solution existed at scale. That gap became ManageXR, which raised a $4M seed round led by Rally Ventures in December 2021 and now serves 100+ enterprise customers across healthcare, training, education, and retail verticals.