The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Nov 2011

Modo Labs provides a mobile engagement platform (Kurogo Mobile Campus, Kurogo Publisher, and Modo Communicate) that enables technical and non-technical staff to quickly create mobile apps and mobilize diverse data sources. The company focuses on higher education, enterprise, and hospital markets and says hundreds of universities and organizations in more than 30 countries use its solutions. Modo reports more than 125 customers, including Georgetown University, Notre Dame, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Central Florida. The new financing is intended to scale product development, customer support, and marketing to meet growing demand for easy-to-use mobile solutions. Modo emphasizes enabling non-developers to deliver full-spectrum mobile experiences and to make mobile apps central communication hubs for organizations. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Modo Labs provides open source content-delivery solutions for mobile platforms and devices, centered on its Kurogo mobile development platform. Kurogo is an open-source, MIT-licensed mobile-optimized middleware that aggregates backend content and enables institutions to build content-rich mobile websites and native apps. Around 150 enterprises and universities use Kurogo, including Harvard, Boston College, Brown, Georgia State University, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The company was founded by colleagues from MIT and Kurogo began as a project to provide mobile information to MIT users in 2007. Modo Labs will use the $4M venture capital investment to accelerate market adoption and to advance innovations in the Kurogo framework and integrated solutions for universities and enterprises. The company offers training and support to institutions and distributes Kurogo freely via downloads and GitHub under the MIT license.