By Nancy Dahlberg
At a time when headlines are dominated by layoffs in the technology industry amid a looming recession, one South Florida-based tech company has been quietly going global, growing headcount and opening new offices.
Today, Social Mobile, a leader in the enterprise mobility space, announced that it has secured a $35 million senior credit facility from Citi. And unlike the other companies in the news, this one has been bootstrapped from its beginning.
The company, headquartered in Broward County, designs, develops and manages custom tech mobility solutions for enterprise customers. Among them, Social Mobile recently launched Social Mobile ONE, a delivery-as-a-service offering combining its hardware, software, managed services and wireless connectivity solutions into a monthly, per device subscription. The company is among an exclusive group of about 100 licensed manufacturers of Android Enterprise devices and is Google’s preferred partner for customized Android solutions.
While Social Mobile builds turnkey mobile solutions for all industries, it heavily focuses on three verticals: healthcare, defense and retail. Social Mobile’s clients include DoorDash, VaxCare, and the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command, among many others. They also partner with U.S. cellular carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.
“Mobile technology is the future for all of our clients, so we design the strategic solutions that improve the security and guarantee them a simplified path to scalability,” CEO Robert Morcos said in an interview with Refresh Miami. “We offer a partnership, not a product, and for that reason we find ourselves being able to attract large clientele.”
The $35 million credit facility will be used to develop new products and services, to continue expanding into overseas markets, and to make strategic acquisitions in the enterprise mobility space, said Morcos, who founded the company in 2011.
In 2023, Social Mobile has big plans. Locally, Morcos said, Social Mobile is building out a 20,000-square-foot design engineering office in Hollywood. The company is also opening up a new office in Hyderabad, India, adding to the main facilities it has in South Florida and in Shenzhen, China.
“We’re expanding our production into multiple countries. There’s a lot of groups that are asking for product outside of China, whether its Mexico, Taiwan, India, Vietnam, so we’re expanding our capabilities to other countries. We’re also updating our product portfolio to cover more healthcare, specifically wearables, a massive market for us now.”
Morcos also said Social Mobile is designing and building the next generation 5G handheld radio with SATCOM functionality for the Air Force Special Operations Command, “and we’re doing that here in Miami, Florida.”
Longer term, Social Mobile plans to continue scaling the business with strategic acquisitions in the supply chain that will help the company add more services and products to its existing client base, Morcos said. “And most importantly, we will use the money … locally to design the engineering of these very secure federal-type devices or healthcare devices. There’s been a big shift, a big demand, so this will help us be able to bring that locally here to South Florida.”
Social Mobile employs upwards of 70 employees now – with just over 50 of them in South Florida – and it’s actively hiring. The company will likely be at 100 employees globally by the end of this year, Morcos said. Layoffs in tech are fairly common these days, but Social Mobile has never had layoffs, he said.
While other companies took investor money over the years, Social Mobile remained 100% family-owned. Morcos was approached plenty of times, but it wasn’t by strategic investors who would help him grow the business but rather “dumb money,” he said.
Morcos, who has four siblings, immigrated from Jordan to the US with his mother at age 3 and began his entrepreneurial journey at age 15 in Miami selling refurbished phones to Latin America. He founded Social Mobile soon after graduating from Florida State University.
“I want to show the industry that it is possible to build a unicorn without outside capital, and we’re well on our way to doing that.”
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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