Company Profile · Commercial A/V Manufacturing
TEKVOX, Inc.
The Texas company making professional A/V powerful and easy for everyone - one factory-built room at a time.
The Texas company making professional A/V powerful and easy for everyone - one factory-built room at a time.
Walk into a classroom, a boardroom, or a city council chamber and you rarely notice the audiovisual system - until it fails. A microphone that won't connect. A projector that needs a password nobody wrote down. A meeting that starts ten minutes late because the screen refuses to cooperate. For most of its history, commercial A/V has been custom-built room by room, each install a small engineering project with its own quirks and its own eventual headaches.
TEKVOX, Inc., a manufacturer based in New Braunfels, Texas, was built around a different premise: that a room's A/V system could arrive the way a piece of consumer electronics does - pre-configured, tested, and ready to run. The company calls its approach Drop-In A/V, and it describes the shift it is trying to make in plain terms: a "Netflix experience in a Blockbuster industry." Instead of renting expertise one custom install at a time, buyers get a standardized whole-room system that works out of the box.
It is an unglamorous ambition, and TEKVOX seems comfortable with that. The company's own tagline - "Yes, your A/V setup can be robust and easy to use" - reads less like a slogan than a rebuttal to an industry that has long treated complexity as a sign of sophistication.
"TEKVOX's goal is to make A/V installations both affordable and supportable."
- Mike Slattery, Founder & Chief InnovatorTEKVOX designs, builds, programs, and factory-tests complete audiovisual room systems around its own control platform. The central innovation is standardization: rather than engineering each room from scratch, TEKVOX creates repeatable templates that can be dropped into one room or replicated across an entire building or campus. Because the systems are assembled and programmed at the factory, there is no in-field configuration and no on-site programming - the parts that most often go wrong on a ladder, five minutes before a meeting.
That factory-first method is the company's argument for reliability. A system that has been built and tested before it ships, TEKVOX contends, is inherently more dependable than one cobbled together on site from a-la-carte components that were never designed to work together. It also collapses the usual finger-pointing: when one manufacturer builds the whole room, there is one number to call when something is off.
Layered on top is the software. TEKVOX applies Internet of Things and enterprise management (EMS) technology to its systems, giving IT teams distributed, networked control and the ability to monitor and manage every room from a single dashboard. Remote management, factory-tested hardware, and lifetime software support are the three legs the company stands on - and the reason a small district with a lean IT staff can run dozens of identical rooms without a specialist in each building.
Teaching and training A/V for K-12 and higher education - designed so an instructor, not a technician, can run the room.
Systems for huddle rooms, conference rooms and boardrooms, tuned for fast, reliable collaboration.
A/V for courtrooms, council chambers and specialized venues where reliability and control matter most.
Underpinning all three is Drop-In A/V, the patented, pre-programmed room approach TEKVOX first showed as a scalable "Drop-In Ready" solution at InfoComm in 2014. Rounding out the catalog: a build-to-specification design service, a component-finder tool for matching parts, installation support, training, and the enterprise management and IoT platform that ties the rooms together.
TEKVOX competes with the custom-integration model that dominates commercial A/V - control giants such as Crestron, AMX, Extron, Biamp and QSC, and the regional integrators who program each room by hand. Its pitch is not that it is more powerful, but that it is more repeatable. The illustrative comparison below reflects TEKVOX's own positioning of pre-configured systems against traditional bespoke integration.
Illustrative comparison based on TEKVOX's stated positioning, not independent benchmarks.
TEKVOX serves four markets: K-12 school districts, colleges and universities, corporate offices and IT departments, and government and civic facilities. Named and pictured customers include Trinity University - whose Center for Sciences and Innovation deployed TEKVOX products - along with local independent school districts, Lone Star, Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M.
The business model is B2B hardware with attached software and support. TEKVOX manufactures the systems and sells both directly and through integrator and reseller channels; in one expansion, CEO Jim Reinhart brought TEKVOX onto the Directron distributor linecard to widen reach. Recurring value comes from the enterprise management software, remote monitoring, and a lifetime software support commitment that keeps the company involved long after the install is done.
Public financial data is limited. Third-party sources estimate annual revenue near $2.7 million and a team of roughly 15 people, and Crunchbase records a $200,000 Series A in November 2014. Those are small numbers for a company claiming thousands of deployed rooms - a reminder that TEKVOX is a focused manufacturer, not a sprawling platform.
Founder and chief innovator Mike Slattery starts TEKVOX in New Braunfels, Texas, with a goal of making A/V affordable and supportable.
TEKVOX shows scalable "Drop-In Ready" A/V solutions built around its award-winning control system - no in-field programming required.
The company raises a $200,000 Series A round.
New university deployments include Trinity University and Prairie View A&M.
TEKVOX relaunches its branding around three product lines: Scholaris, Concurro and Etalto.
"Easy to configure. Easy to install. Easy to use." - the whole company in six words.
- TEKVOX, on the promise behind Drop-In A/VTEKVOX literally describes itself as "a Netflix experience in a Blockbuster industry."
Systems are built and tested at the factory - so nothing gets programmed on-site.
It's headquartered in New Braunfels, a Texas town better known for tubing the Guadalupe than for enterprise A/V.
The product names read like a lesson: Scholaris (school), Concurro (meet), Etalto (elevate).
TEKVOX counts 20 years as a company plus 20 more from its founders' prior A/V careers.
Because one maker builds the whole room, support isn't a game of vendor finger-pointing.