Mersive has breakout year in 2014, makes collaboration in millennial culture easy

by Doug Pitorak
February 17, 2015

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One thing Mersive CEO Rob Balgley thoroughly enjoys about his job is telling engineers that Boeing just ordered five licenses of their product, news that surely brings pause to their 10-12 daily hours of writing code.

“That’s what really energizes everybody,” Balgley said. “We built a product that’s never been built, and big companies are buying it and using it.”

Based on the work of CTO Christopher Jaynes and Chief Scientist Stephen Webb, Mersive is shaping up to be quite a player in the unified collaboration industry, with customers including TIAA-CREF, Toyota, Valpak, ConocoPhillips, U.S. Intelligence Agencies, Yale University and Duke University. The Denver-based company owes most of its commercial success to Solstice, the software Mersive launched in Spring 2013 that accommodates BYOD, multi-source collaboration. Any number of users can connect their devices to the network and simultaneously share content on one clear display; the Solstice Client app is available for free in Google Play, the App Store and other common app marketplaces.

A license for Solstice costs up to $2,000, depending on the size of the room. It can be purchased only through resellers, primarily those that specialize in the AV industry. According to Balgley, Mersive sold $3 million worth of Solstice licenses in 2014, its first full year on the market. 

Simply put, Solstice allows for more effective collaboration in a workspace.

“You’re leveraging your intellectual capital,” he said. “You’ve moved from presentation, which is single-threaded, to collaboration, which is multi-threaded. So now, rather than making a decision on one Excel spreadsheet, you can make a decision based on multiple Excel spread sheets, or maybe heterogeneous data.”

Balgley said the inspiration for Solstice came when surveying the market for customer feedback on Sol, Mersive’s first product, which allows users to seamlessly integrate multiple projectors into a single, large, high-definition display.

What makes Solstice more valuable than Sol as a commercial asset? The fact that, as Balgley said, “There isn’t a room that can’t have this technology.”

Solstice is useful in a variety of settings and is easy to setup. Sol is also easy to setup, but Balgley said it is reserved for niche markets, such as fighter jet simulation domes. 

He said Mersive has sold several million dollars worth of Sol since its inception and it plans to continue to issue the product. Going forward, however, Mersive is banking on the continued success of Solstice. The team has made multiple updates to the software and plans to release another update this summer. 

Mersive did not have an easy time breaking into the AV reseller channel, Balgley said, citing loyalty to long-time brands Crestron Electronics, Barcon and Extron Electronics as an obstacle. Once they broke through, however, Mersive had success. Balgley said new customers place 50-55 percent of a month’s orders; existing customers make 40-45 percent of them. Funding has come in three rounds thus far: about $1 million in a 2006-2007 A round; a $4 million - $5 million B round in 2009; and an undisclosed C round in fall 2012.

More important than his ability to pitch to resellers or Mersive’s funding rounds, Balgley said Solstice fills a need in a market that is influenced by millennial culture, which has resulted in more ad-hoc meetings and meeting spaces.

“It’s a new industry,” Balgley said. “We sit with big banks and with big consumer-packaged goods companies, and it’s fascinating to hear what they expect, where they want us to go. I’m excited about the prospects of continuing to develop the product. There’s a lot more that we want to do.”

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