QuickMobile Raises $3.2 Million in Funding

The Vancouver-based mobile event app developer has raised $6.5 million in the past six months, allowing it to expand in the corporate event planning market

Vancouver’s QuickMobile announced Tuesday that it closed its latest $3.2 million round of financing led by Vancity and BDC IT Venture Fund.

The additional funding will allow QuickMobile to ramp up to meet new demands in the event planning market and build on its existing technology, says CEO Patrick Payne.

“We have more than 30 Fortune 100 companies [as clients], and some of them had been saying to us, look, 80 per cent of our people have downloaded one or numerous of your event apps, and they said why don’t we come up with a plan where we create one single app and we could put all of those events inside that app,” Payne says. “What we finally came up with was a multi-event app platform… and it’s a kind of self-serve model,” says Payne.

QuickMobile builds content management systems for corporate events, which allow event planners to design digital programs, co-ordinate services and solicit feedback from attendees. It counts Google, AnheuserBusch and Pepsi among its clientele.

Built for iPad, iPhone and Android, the Vancouver company bills its technology as the first smartphone-centric mobile event app, allowing event planners to build and design multi-use apps, without the need for a background in computer science.

“We don’t really focus on a vertical per se,” says Payne. QuickMobile has developed apps for pharmaceutical, financial and technology companies

The company’s differential is its multi-event app, which replaces paper placards and sign in sheets and the one-time custom event app. Instead, the platform allows its clients to coordinate multiple events through a one-time downloadable corporate-branded app.

“It’s a SaaS business model,” says Payne. “We provide technology and applications and they use our CMS and framework to build applications within that master app, event app.”

The latest round builds on the $3.3 million it received from investors led by BDC IT Venture Fund in 2012, and the $2.6 million in equity investments QuickMobile received in 2011 from Vancity and angel investors.