An Irvine company that hopes to make everyone from computer technicians to plumbers more efficient with wireless Internet access is getting a boost of its own with a $23 million venture capital infusion.
FieldCentrix, which designs wireless Internet-based dispatching systems for businesses that provide on-site service to customers, is set to announce Monday an investment deal that will help it begin selling overseas and into new industries, company officials said.
Grainger Technology Partners, the investment arm of maintenance and repair supply seller W.W. Grainger Inc., led the deal along with Sigma Partners of Menlo Park, which had funded earlier rounds at FieldCentrix. Santa Monica-based TMCT Ventures, also participated.
“Was it hard? Damn right it was,” said David Key, FieldCentrix president and chief executive, when asked whether Wall Street’s outlook on the tech sector made it more difficult to secure the $23 million.
Although plenty of investors expressed interest, he said, coming to terms on how much to value the start-up complicated the process.
Fortunately for Key, FieldCentrix is entrenched in the wireless sector, which along with fiber optics has largely shrugged off the dot-com doldrums.
“The wireless market is absolutely molten,” he said.
Key’s industry connections probably didn’t hurt either. As part of the founding team of Costa Mesa software company FileNET Corp., Key is a well-known member of Orange County’s technology community.
FieldCentrix raised $10 million in April 1999 and has raised about $60 million overall.
The 6-year-old company designs systems that manage field service operations using the Internet, a company’s internal computer system and handheld devices carried by service technicians. The system, introduced in 1998, handles everything from scheduling and dispatching appointments to updating the central office on the progress of service calls to mapping out the addresses of the next stop.
FieldCentrix also offers software that doesn’t require handheld computers.
The system, which comes as a suite of four building-block components that can be used with or without each other, is designed to make better use of technicians’ time. It allows them to fit more service calls into a workday,an improvement that can have a direct impact on a company’s sales. According to Key, most customers can recoup their costs within six to nine months.
Mesa Energy Systems, an air-conditioning service company based in Irvine, is one of FieldCentrix’s most vocal advocates, with testimonials appearing on both FieldCentrix’s and Microsoft Corp.’s Web sites. (The system runs on Microsoft’s Windows operating system and uses the handheld computers that use its PocketPC operating system.)
Most of FieldCentrix’s funding will be used to open sales offices overseas and to tailor its product to new industries, including electrical, utilities, property management, and heavy equipment and materials handling. The company employs about 120 people and plans to hire more people in the coming months, many of them from the University of California, Irvine.
One of the most recent additions is Ronald Fikert, who joined the company last month as its chief financial officer.
The company won’t reveal sales or estimate a timetable for profitability, but Key said his business plan paves a path there. Unlike some tech companies, he contends, FieldCentrix can make a clear business case for customers.
“We have not lost a deal to a competitor this year,” he said. n
