SoonR Inc., a two-year-old startup that makes technology to ease document sharing across different telecommunications and computing devices, is announcing Tuesday, Jan. 8, that it raised $9.5 million in a second round of venture funding.
The Series B investment, led by Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., follows a $6 million Series A round last year from financial backers including Intel Capital of San Jose and Clearstone Venture Partners of Santa Monica, Calif., which also participated in this latest round.
SoonR CEO Patrick McVeigh said he expects the latest funding to carry the company through 2008. McVeigh described the company's technology as a practical approach to sharing files for office workers and other individuals who often went back and forth between a desktop computer and a cell phone or other mobile device to check e-mail, use applications and retrieve documents.
"We believe people are on the go and may have any number of different devices, and we want to empower them to have the same capabilities that an office computer has," said McVeigh.
The executive emphasized, however, that SoonR's technology is not related to competing movements to move all critical data off of PCs and onto mobile devices, or to store all critical applications remotely in a so-called cloud. Rather, SoonR regards the PC as being as critical as any other computing device.
Customers, who typically use SoonR's technology through a telecom service provider, receive a piece of desktop equipment that will automatically back up documents and then "virtualize" them so that they can be accessed from a different device.
To date most of SoonR's customers are overseas. In recent months, for example, the company entered a partnership with Danish telecom service provider TeliaSonera AB, and McVeigh said it plans to enter the U.S. market later this year.
Even before attracting venture funding from Cisco, SoonR had a close working relationship with the networking equipment maker through its partnership with WebEx Communications Inc., a maker of Internet conferencing technology that Cisco acquired early last year for $3.2 billion. McVeigh said that SoonR's technology fits well with Cisco, which he said was one of the first tech companies to recognize the massive convergence between the desktop and mobile worlds.
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