Theatro, a Dallas based SaaS company, has announced that it has secured a strategic investment from Cisco Investments and Honeywell Ventures for its voice-controlled mobile platform that connects hourly employees to each other and to essential enterprise information. The world’s first voice-driven Intelligent Assistant platform is being offered as a ”hardware-enabled” software as a service solution, and is designed to provide deskless employees a “heads up and hands-free” connection to their corporate systems and management teams.
Chris Todd, President and CEO of Theatro, said, “We are proud to have Cisco Investments and Honeywell Ventures join us in our journey as investors. Companies across a wide variety of industries are recognizing the significant customer experience and productivity benefits of a connected and engaged workforce. Our collaborations with Cisco and Honeywell ensure that Theatro will remain at the cutting edge of both networking and mobile standards and help us bring these benefits to more organizations, in a seamless and comprehensive manner.”
The new partnership is set to transform the future of retail, hospitality, manufacturing and other sectors involving large deskless workforces. Moreover, Theatro said the investments will assist in maximizing the reach of the company’s in-ear virtual assistant and expand the industries and geographies it can serve.
For Cisco, this funding will extend its strategic vision of Cognitive Collaboration, which harness software and hardware, AI and network synergies “to drive interoperability and workforce transformation.” Donald Tucker, Head of Collaboration Corporate Development and Investments, Cisco, said, “Enabling collaborative tools to penetrate organizations’ employee populations more deeply and more productively is the next frontier in workforce enablement. We look forward to unlocking that potential with Theatro.”
In addition, Theatro expands the range of options that are available for providing employees with mobile information, thus aligning with Honeywell’s efforts to effectively use the power of IoT-generated data and insights. John Waldron, President and CEO of Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions, said, “As we continue to develop and invest in software-driven industrial innovation, we understand the tremendous value in leveraging Theatro’s platform into new technologies, verticals and geographies. It adds an established, highly incremental new platform to Honeywell’s mobile solutions portfolio, and we look forward to exploring new applications for the technology in the near future.”
