5,000 clients in 90 countries: what a bootstrapped startup did right

42Gears founders Prakash and Onkar.

Onkar Singh used to work with telecoms giant Motorola. While developing rugged handheld devices there, he could see how EMM solutions – ways for businesses to manage and secure their mobile devices – were crying out to be improved. It was an itch that he had to scratch.

He decided to take the plunge. Onkar teamed up with his co-worker at Motorola, Prakash Gupta, a mobile computing solutions expert. And that was the birth of 42Gears Mobility Systems.

Today the Bangalore-based company provides enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions to more than 5,000 companies across 90 countries in industries like healthcare, telecom, education, aviation, and food and beverages.

“Mobile devices are designed with individual users in mind. However, deploying them in a business set-up is risky without proper security and control. This is where we come in. We enable the adoption of mobile devices for business use,” explains Onkar, founder and CEO of 42Gears.

Companies the world over rely on its products to manage thousands of mobile devices across different platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows.

“We are a profitable set-up, bootstrapped and running successfully for the past seven years,” Onkar tells Tech in Asia.

Driving up productivity

Photo credit: Pete Birkinshaw

In the name of the company lies the answer to what it does. Just as gears help movement within a machine, the company’s tools help in the movement of information within an enterprise.  And the number 42? Let’s just say it fascinates the founders.

The company essentially has four products – SureLock, SureFox, SureVideo, and SureMDM – available on iOS, Android, and Windows. These are designed for mobile devices and tablets, but can be extended to laptops with Windows.

“Our solutions are beneficial wherever mobile devices are deployed for business use – so they are not specific to any industry. Customers across numerous verticals, be it education, hospitality, or transportation, can use them,” says Onkar who is now based in the US.

If a company plans to equip its field force with mobile devices or allow the use of tablets as kiosks in retail stores or in taxis, it would not want the devices to be misused. And that’s exactly where the mobile device lockdown and remote management products from 42Gears can help.

So the company’s products help enterprises increase mobile workforce productivity.

Bootstrapping success

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