Guardian Mobile secures $3m in Series B funding

VANCOUVER, B.C.--Guardian Mobile Monitoring Services closed a Series B funding round, with $3 million coming from new investor BC Advantage Funds, in addition to angel investors and software executives from Vancouver and the United States. Although $2 million in Series A funding was completed in 2005, this is the first institutional round of funding for the company. As a requirement of the financial backing, David Raffa has been appointed to the board representing BC Advantage, joining his chief executive officer Greg Peet, and John Mack, chief executive officer of USBX Advisory Services in Los Angeles, as non-executive directors. "With David Raffa we're getting an understanding of how companies need to build and grow," said John Tedesco, president and chief executive officer of Guardian. "BC focuses on early stage software. The challenge is specific to our group as we grow into something bigger." Tedesco said the money will be used in two major ways: to market to the security vertical and add to Guardian's existing product suite. "Marketing up to this point has been done primarily via word of mouth, but we've gotten some early adopters. Now that GPS is mainstream and there are exciting new products, we need to market to the industry and let it know that we are the leading provider," said Tedesco. Guardian's existing product suite features fleet management, asset tracking and a teen driver safety solution, which will be rolled out this year, but the company will continue to add to its life-safety line with child and pet tracking and elderly monitoring technology in the near future, Tedesco said. "This financing will help Guardian to extend our leadership position within the security alarm vertical and to expand into other reseller markets." This will include international expansion, said Rob Goehring, vice president of product management and marketing at Guardian. "Currently, we're just in North America, but we've got a lot of pull into Mexico and South America, Europe and the Middle East, some of the money will be dedicated to those markets." Guardian's GPS platform works with any wireless network using location technology. Resellers are able to offer branded GPS-based monitoring services to commercial and consumer customers. "A lot of the applications we're seeing in the security channel are really coming to market now," said Goehring. "We've got some great central station partners who use our systems and resell it today. It's like video almost 10 years ago--it's becoming a mass product very quickly. The funding is going to help us reach out to dealers and help them make money by helping them resell the product." Some of Guardian's resellers in the monitoring industry include Criticom Monitoring Services, COPS, Rapid Response, and Acadian On Watch in Louisiana. "Our GPS monitoring platform helps dealers earn recurring monthly revenue in different industry verticals, and on the product side, GPS is a very up-and-coming thing," said Goehring.