Moka5, a Redwood City, Calif. startup that wants to give businesses and consumers a way to carry a virtual computer around with them on an iPod, USB stick or other storage device, has raised $15 million more in a second round of financing.
The round was led by Highland Capital Partners and included an additional investment by existing investor Khosla Ventures. We first mentioned this company last year, when it raised $3 million from Khosla. The company also announced Bill Demas, a former Microsoft and Yahoo executive, is chief executive.
We talked with Demas today, and he made clear the company is in its early days. It is still testing its product with a limited number of people, and will launch openly later this year or early next. We'll be getting a USB stick so that we can test it out. We'll be sold if Moka5 can really let us carry around the contents of our dream computer -- from operating system, to applications, to files -- on a little stick. Just think if we never have to worry about configuring a new computer again. Moka5 would let us insert the stick in any computer -- new or old -- and voila, our system is up and running.
Demas clearly tried to underplay the ability of the company to deliver on that vision right away. There's a lot of work required to let us tailor our system like that, not to mention to be able to take our content from an existing computer and put it into the USB stick. The company currently has a limit on storage it can support. The consumer test version will come out later this year. Right now, it has let developers create their own configurations for a computer, which Moka5 calls LivePC (more details here).
Demas also stressed it will be secure. If a virus hits your system, Moka5's virtual technology can rewind so that you can get to a place before the virus hit.
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