Perfecto Mobile, which aims to help companies deploy applications across a wide variety of handsets and networks, has pocketed $7 million in a second round of funding from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Vertex Venture Capital. An Israel-based startup, Perfecto (which recently changed its name from Nexperience) targets carriers, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and developers with a service that allows them to test mobile apps remotely via the Internet. The company is vying for room on the playground with a handful of other startups including Mobile Complete — which has gained substantial traction with its DeviceAnywhere solution — and Metrico.
Like its competitors, Perfecto Mobile hopes to address the “porting” problems that have long plagued the mobile-data space. Publishers are often required by carriers to support a broad swath of handsets in order to get placement on the “deck” (the operator’s portal), forcing developers to port apps for each specific device. Those hurdles will only get larger as operators open up their networks and begin to support a wider variety of apps and services from more developers. And, as several speakers pointed out during last week’s Mobilize 09 conference in San Francisco, the ever-increasing number of smartphone platforms only exacerbates the problem for developers, who often must choose which OSes to support and which to pass up.
Perfecto Mobile’s solution supports Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and J2ME (Java for Mobile Edition). The company said it will use the funding to expand its service and ramp up marketing efforts.
It’s great to see companies in the space getting investment. However, to quickly clarify, we at Metrico don’t compete with companies like Perfecto and Mobile Complete/Device Anywhere. In fact, we are a customer of Device Anywhere and our services are quite complementary – they provide infrastructure for remote content testing, and we provide services and solutions for testing the performance of the mobile devices.