What are the Biggest Trends in Mobile Enterprise?

The first half of 2016 witnessed the continued growth of the mobile enterprise market. Based on venture activity and major enterprise announcements from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, it is becoming increasingly clear that mobile is the next major platform in business.

At Emergence Capital, we have been studying and publishing on the mobile enterprise space for over three years, and continue to be extremely excited about what mobile can do for businesses of all types and sizes. In this midyear update of our Mobile Enterprise Trends Report, we give a recap of 1H 2016 venture activity, highlight the new initiatives by major enterprise players and identify the next opportunities within mobile enterprise.

Recap of 1H 2016 Venture Activity

Venture funding of mobile enterprise companies increased 14% to $370MM in the first half of 2016 versus the same period in 2015. While this may not seem like amazing growth, overall U.S. venture funding decreased by 1% in 1H 2016 versus 1H 2015 according to CrunchBase. In particular, several mobile enterprise segments have seen significant funding growth this year. These include horizontal segments such as sales/marketing and HR — as well as industry-specific areas including education and restaurants. In addition to overall increases in mobile enterprise financing activity, we have noticed an increase in growth stage Series C & D rounds in 1H 2016. We believe this is evidence of the increasing number of mobile enterprise companies that are gaining scale and maturing.

A Shifting Landscape

We added 28 companies to the mobile enterprise landscape in 1H 2016. This brings the total number of companies on the landscape to 341, an increase of 9% versus our last update in the fall of 2015. Over the last 18 months, we have seen a noticeable uptick in applications built specifically for “deskless” workers. Deskless workers comprise 80% of the world’s workforce and can be found in industries such as construction, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. Many of these deskless workers have never had the benefit of a computer at work to help them be more productive. Imagine how much value can be created for this part of the working world when they can move away from manual and paper-based processes and instead use mobile based technology to get their jobs done. At Emergence, we believe there will be many billion-dollar mobile enterprise companies created to address the deskless worker population.

The Future of Mobile

Looking into the future of mobile, we are increasingly excited by the unique ways enterprise mobile applications are evolving and combining with other technology disruptions. Mobile applications are leveraging new interfaces like virtual and augmented reality to provide immersive experiences for workers. Mobile apps are becoming increasingly interconnected with new sensors including wearables, drones and other devices to provide rich data sets that power previously unthinkable business processes. Lastly, for simple use cases, mobile applications are going “app-less” with basic functionality accessed directly via chat interfaces. The pace of evolution and growth of enterprise mobile is accelerating and we at Emergence are excited by the opportunities these rapid changes are creating.