Numecent Raises $13.6M From T-Ventures For Push-Pull, Cloudpaging Service
Numecent has raised $13.6 million from T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom for its technology to “cloudify” on-premise or desktop apps. The Series B round brings the total raises to $15 million.
Irvine-based Numecent has carved a space for itself in the market for bringing Windows apps to the cloud. The service uses a push-pull technology that allows software instructions and data to be paged from the cloud in real time.
The cloudpaging technology analyzes a customer’s PC to determine what code is needed to run the apps through the cloud. Once the technology is set up, a customer can stream the app to other devices, making it an obvious value for telecom providers to make games and videos available without installing on an end device.
“We instead transmit software instructions which execute on the client machine transiently,” said Osman Kent, co-founder and CEO of Numecent. “This avoids the download hell for large apps. The cloudpaged software is never installed on your machine.” He said the process keeps a machine pristine and avoids installation problems.
Customers can optionally enable SaaS for these native apps with no changes to the underlying software.
It takes a few hours to process the apps for use in the cloud. The technology is not of the desktop virtualization variety, but more so takes a full image that runs on the user’s computer.
“We are to software what Dropbox is to data,” Kent said in reference to a remark one analyst made about the technology.
The company licenses its technology to independent software vendors and managed service providers. Telcos and enterprises are using the technology on third-party data centers and then deliver the services to their customers.
Kent said the technology is protected by 12 patents. In Sarah Perez’s post about Numecent, the company said it had 10 patents in streaming and virtualization through its subsidiary, Endeavours Technologies, spun out of a think tank for a DARPA project.
Numecent has 30 employees and expect to have 45 by the end of the year.