Fleetsmith, a start-up that wants to facilitate the management of Apple devices by companies, announced today a $ 7.7 million Series A round led by Upfront Ventures.
Initial investors Index Ventures and Harrison Meta also participated in the tour. The company has raised a total of $ 11 million. They also announced that Luke Kanies, founder and former CEO of Puppet, has joined their board of directors.
Fleetsmith wants to help SMEs provide and manage Apple devices that it's computers, phones, iPad or Apple TV . Trying to provision these devices manually is a time-consuming process, which large companies do not have to cope with because of other business options or internal solutions, but Fleetsmith puts this same type of effective management in place peripherals within the reach of smaller organizations. by offering it as a cloud service.
The two co-founders, Zack Blum and Jesse Endahl, who came from Dropbox and Phantom were both in positions where they had to buy and deploy Apple devices and could not find a good way for a small business to do. the market.
"How do you manage a fleet of Macs and secure them via the Internet?" We looked around when we were in a build / buy position and saw a lot to do.We are democratizing what companies like Google and Facebook have With their own internal Mac management tools [home-grown]"said Blum CEO at Techcrunch.
Fleetsmith aircraft management console. Photo: Fleetsmith
The company leverages the Device Enrollment Program, a commercial device management service from Apple to simplify the provisioning of Apple products. As long as the IT administrator is registered in DEP, you can use Fleetsmith, explains Blum. An employee can then order a laptop (or any device), and when he connects to the WiFi, he connects to Fleetsmith, who automatically configures the device.
"The most interesting thing about the integration of DEP in our features is that as soon as the employee connects to the WiFi, he supports the deployment.The account is created, the software is installed, the drive is encrypted.This greatly facilitates the installation and registration of new people, "he said.When you have installed everything you need, the l & # 39; administrator may force critical updates, but the system will give you several warnings before you install the update.
"Fleetsmith is a perfectly applied automation, transmitting all the subordinate work to the computer so that people do less fire and more strategic work.This is particularly important in the mid-market as teams are more thin and every computer account, "said Kanies in a statement.
The cost of the service is only $ 99 per year per device to access the cloud service. They offer a freemium version to manage up to 10 devices at no cost. The company was launched in 2016 and currently has 20 employees. Customers include HackerOne, Robinhood and Nuna.