Biba promises to help make business communication less ‘awful,’ pulls in $15M

Mobile apps are growing up and entering the workplace. Today yet another mobile-enterprise startup launched an application to adapt smartphones to the business world and revealed substantial VC backing.

Biba is a mobile app that facilitates corporate communication. It delivers conference calls and messaging inside and outside of company networks and across multiple devices. Biba includes solutions for audio and web conference, enterprise instant messaging, and unified communications.

The product contains a comprehensive contact list for people inside your organization and displays their availability (like green or red on GChat). Its messaging capability stores message history and syncs conversations across multiple devices, so you can start a conversion at your desk and continue it on the road. It also makes group communication easier. The conference call tool eliminates the need for dial-ins or pass codes for people logged into the app, and it sends out the contact information for people who aren’t inside the network.

Biba has basically taken bits from various other enterprise communication startups like Yammer, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Speek, and GChat and bundles them together in a user-friendly, mobile-first application. It is sitting at the nexus of a few important trends in the technology world right now. The consumerization of the enterprise is a hot topic as companies are building well-designed, easy-to-use products that draw inspiration from the consumer-facing world.

To learn more about the BYOD device movement, check out the “IT: Consumerization of the enterprise” track at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference, July 9-10.

We were also seeing the rise of the Bring-Your-Own-Device movement, which Biba directly caters to. Gone are the days when we used our phones mainly to play Words with Friends and find our way to the nearest bar. More than ever, people are using their personal devices for work purposes. Enterprise organizations and startups alike are working hard to ensure that the mobile workforce has the tools it needs to be productive, access data, and communicate within a secure and cloud-connected environment.

InterWest Partners led this $15 million round of funding, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures, as well as former CEO of Symantec Enrique Salem and CEO of Trapit and former President of WebEx Gary Griffiths. Customers include Symantec, Hotwire, Atlassian, and LiveFyre. Biba is based in San Francisco and is available on iOS, Android, or Mac. It was founded in 2011.

Photo credit: michaelstyne/Flickr