Ian Collins, an entrepreneur and investor, has founded 6 tech companies in 18 years and raised over $100 million in venture capital.
Collins has spent the last 20 years founding technology ventures. He started his career as an engineer in the wireless industry working for Canada’s largest mobile operators. Collins founded his first company, Wyrex Communications Inc. in 1993. Wyrex provided engineering services to wireless operators around the world during the 2G build outs of the 90s. Wyrex grew to over 50 engineers with a focus on back office network deployment and planning.
During that time Collins founded his second company, Wysdom Inc. with the mission to “take dotcoms wireless”. Wysdom grew during the boom years of 1998 to 2000 with over $80 million of venture capital to more than 300 employees and boasted many of the top dotcoms as customers. He also founded another company in 1999 called Web2Mobile, one of the world’s first wireless content portals.
After a short retirement from 2001-2002, Collins founded Mobile Diagnostix in 2003. Mobile Diagnostix was focused on solving the problem of mobile data customer care facing the world’s wireless operators. With it’s flagship product SmartCare, Mobile Diagnostix provided customer service solutions to some of the world’s top carriers. After selling Mobile Diagnostix in 2004 Ian founded Storage Appliance Corporation (Clickfree) in 2005, with the intent of solving consumer’s backup nightmares. Storage Appliance Corporation developed the world’s first line of Clickfree backup products where no interaction was required by customers to fully backup their personal computers.
In 2012 Collins founded CrowdCare with the plan to revolutionize the way people provide customer service to Smartphones. In 2014, CrowdCare Corporation announced it has raised an additional $3.5 million to further advance the deployment of Wysdom, a real-time context based self-care solution for the connected world. CrowdCare has been successful in creating a next-generation customer care platform that enables carriers to get in front of supporting the growing IoT wave.