Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Last week, Enplug, a Los Angeles startup who we have covered on these pages a few times (January, 2012 here and August 2012 here) announced that they had raised USD 2.5 Million in seed funding.
Founded in 2012 by Nanxi Liu (CEO), Alex Ross (CTO), Zach Spitulski (Head Designer), David Zhu (COO), and Navdeep Reddy (CIO), Enplug has grown from a team of 5 to 30 full-time people so it will no doubt be needing the money.
Enplug claim a network of displays in 40 cities across the US and in hundreds of businesses ranging from bars and restaurants to corporate offices and hotels but despite Enplug’s pleas, we haven’t seen any evidence of them, we quote “disrupting the digital signage industry with the company’s technology and business model”. Obviously little due diligence was done by any of the investors cos’ all we see is an out of touch LA startup that thinks its hip, blindly re-inventing more than one wheel, pretending to themselves and others that they are pioneering whilst believing that the better mouse-trap that they think they have ‘invented’ will bring in customers galore!
Investors included Oaktree Capital Co-Founder Larry Keele, Juniper Networks Founding Member Rasoul Oskouy, Idealab Founder Bill Gross, Former AT&T President and CTO Hossein Eslambolchi, Interscope Executive Vice President David Cohen, Lightspeed Venture Partners Managing Director Justin Caldbeck, Atom Factory CEO Troy Carter, Activision Co-Founder Howard Marks, DominateFund and zPark Venture which means most likely that each individual / institution wrote a cheque for something like USD 250,000.
That won’t last them long and won’t get them very far.
April 20th, 2014 at 13:19 @597
And soon, this Who’s Who of tech investors will receive a lawyer’s letter representing Chris Beauchamp of MonsterMedia, suggesting that Enplug has infringed his patent on social media in digital signage. His shakedown tour is only beginning. One hopes that Enplug’s investors will have the stones to provide him with the beat down he deserves.
April 20th, 2014 at 20:29 @895
My oh my, disrupting the industry with our technology and business model. How novel of these folks. Look away, I’m returning to waxing my balls.