Reach Mobile is on a roll, having secured an additional $16 million in funding, bringing its total funding to date to $35.6 million.
That’s going to come in handy as the company is undergoing a growth spurt. The company, which enables MVNOs, among other things, employs about 120 people with the goal of adding more this year.
“We’re hiring a lot of people,” Reach Mobile CEO Harjot Saluja told Fierce. “My hope is to hire 100, but I don’t know if we’ll get there, honestly.”
Reach Mobile stresses how easy it makes it for companies to add services like mobile or fixed wireless access (FWA) to their repertoires. Earlier this year, Reach made headlines when it was revealed that WideOpenWest (WOW) is using its services to launch a mobile offering.
WOW misses launch target
That mobile offering was expected to be launched last month. WOW CEO Teresa Elder said during the company’s earnings call that it was on track to launch the WOW! Mobile service powered by Reach in one of its southern markets by the end of May, but that didn’t happen.
Reach Mobile referred inquiries to WOW. A spokesperson for WOW told Fierce that the company is close to a soft launch in one of its markets, but didn’t reveal which market or what the hang-up is.
European expansion
Meanwhile, Saluja is in Berlin this week to meet with partners, potential customers and to speak at an MVNO conference.
“We are feeling pretty good about the U.S. market,” expanding into more accounts and adding more use cases with existing customers, he said. “Especially with fixed wireless and mobile, the European market makes sense.”
It's basically looking to replicate a similar model in the European market. He’s already had meetings with carriers from Sweden and the U.K.
“It sounds very similar to when we started talking to carriers in the U.S. even though they have been around and they’ve been doing wholesale for a while, but I think when they looked at our product, it kind of clicked for them,” he said.
According to Reach Mobile, its Reach Next platform is turnkey and quick. Depending on how much customization a client wants, it can take between 60 days to six months tops to launch a new service – something that used to take one to two years. Use cases include MVNO, FWA, failover internet and IoT.
"Reach is popularizing the idea that network-based services can be launched quickly and easily by companies without wireless expertise," said Jake Maas, EVP at Graham Holdings Company, a lead investor in Reach Mobile's recent $8 million funding round, in a statement. "We're excited to help Reach double-down in the domestic broadband space and fuel growth in new geographies and use cases."
Like any service in mobile or fixed wireless, “you need the IT service and you need the service orchestration in addition to the network. The network is just one leg of the three-legged stool,” Saluja said. “We bring everything from soup to nuts,” including account management and payment services. “With our platform, it’s just a one-stop shop… We can get them to market in 60 days.”
The company offers its Reach Next Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that accelerates and streamlines how companies bring network-based services to market. Virtually everything needed to operate a network-based service can be found in the cloud-native platform, including the front-end customer experiences, back-office customer care and operations portals, and the network integration itself, according to Reach Mobile, which has network use agreements with all three U.S. national carriers. The WOW service will use T-Mobile’s 5G network.