EQview Hopes to Whistle $20M Dixie Tune

Atlanta-based eQview recently discovered that location, location, location can sometimes pay off big dividends.

Situated in the heart of one of the Southeast?s hottest venture capital markets, the maker of Internet applications integration technology scored $3 million in an over-subscribed Series A deal. And plans are already in the works for an additional $15 million to $20 million of VC financing early next year.

Cordova Ventures and 20 undisclosed individual investors made commitments in eQview?s first round of financing. The company originally sought $2 million, but upped the ante to $3 million when several local angel investors expressed interest in the deal, said Chris Morocco, eQview?s executive vice president of marketing and strategic alliances.

The five-month-old company intends to use proceeds from the completed deal to grow its customer base, open an office in Palo Alto, Calif. and hire at least 75 additional employees by next spring. It also plans to begin sales and marketing efforts to promote its signature product, the Qmunicator.

Formerly a “work-for-hire” product used primarily on a consulting basis, the Qmunicator enables companies to extend their business processes across the Internet by integrating existing enterprise applications with those of customers, suppliers, business partners and employees. Designed to help disparate computer systems exchange information and conduct business transactions in real-time over corporate networks or via the Internet, it?s based on a queued messaging architecture that can integrate and facilitate communication between everything from antiquated mainframes to the latest computer technologies.

By targeting large corporations and major marketplace exchanges for the transportation and manufacturing industries as potential end-users, eQview hopes to seize a significant marketshare in the emerging Internet application integration sector.

“This is a fairly crowded space, but we have a competitive advantage because our product was built for a complex environment like the Internet,” Morocco said. “Most of our competitors? technology was built to integrate mainframes on a one-to-one level. They?re trying to re-engineer that technology to make it compatible with what?s out there today, and it was never meant to do what they?re trying to make it do.”

Conversely, eQview?s Qmunicator has the ability to integrate 60,000 personal computers and help them communicate on a many-to-many level.

If nothing else, the company?s unique approach is piquing investors? interest. In fact, Morocco revealed that eQview has already had some preliminary meetings with venture capital firms and major corporations to discuss raising its Series B round, but he declined to divulge the specific parties involved.

He did report, however, that eQview intends to use a majority of the capital from its second round of financing to launch an aggressive marketing campaign in order to ramp up sales of its Qmunicator product.