Visage Mobile raises $4.5M to help companies manage their smartphone budget

As more businesses look to equip their workforce with smartphones, a company called Visage Mobile offers tools to help manage the process, with a web dashboard showing phone inventory and usage across multiple carriers. The company just raised another $4.5 million to fund further product development and sales.

The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from existing investors Worldview Technology Partners, ATA Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and Emergence Capital Partners. Qualcomm Ventures is the investment arm of the wireless chip maker, Qualcomm. Visage Mobile chief executive Tim Weingarten said this is a strategic investment for Qualcomm — the hope is that by giving IT managers “control of their mobility environment,” more companies will be willing to give smartphones to their employees, which should increase the use of Qualcomm technology.

There are other startups offering services to help IT departments manage employee smartphones, including Sequoia Capital-backed MobileIron. But Weingarten said the most common case among Visage Mobile’s new customers is that they try to monitor their costs and inventory using a basic spreadsheet or database.

And it’s much earlier in the corporate smartphone adoption process than you might think, at least if you’re in Silicon Valley, Weingarten added, where “everybody’s got an iPhone or a BlackBerry.” Visage Mobile cited market research showing that there are currently 20 million corporate smartphones, reprsenting only 13 percent of the country’s workforce. That number is expected to increase to 20 percent by 2012.

San Francisco-based Visage Mobile initially offered mobile virtual network operators, but eventually that plan unraveled and the company sold off most of its assets. It then raised $2 million last year to fund a new new focus on IT management of employee smartphones.

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