Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Mobile Tech, Inc., d/b/a Mobile Technologies Inc. ("MTI") — also formerly known as Merchandising Technologies Inc. — is a privately held manufacturer headquartered at 1050 NW 229th Ave., Hillsboro, Oregon. Company profiles and press releases date its founding to 1977 (CB Insights lists 1979). It has been private-equity owned since August 2016, when Vestar Capital Partners acquired it from Hammond, Kennedy, Whitney & Company (which had held it since 2013); terms were not disclosed. Vestar Capital is the only owner I could verify, and MTI has no public ticker. Third-party data aggregators (Apollo, LeadIQ, Crustdata) estimate roughly 500–1,000 employees and revenue in the $100–250M band, but estimates range widely and are not company-confirmed.
Products / operations. MTI is an operating company, not an NPE. It designs, assembles and supports retail loss-prevention and merchandising hardware: powered display stands, alarm modules, sensors, retractable cables, smart locks and RFID cabinet locks that secure, power and charge consumer electronics (phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, headphones, speakers) on retail floors. Its ArmorActive division builds tablet enclosures, mounts and kiosk hardware for enterprise deployments, and the MTI Connect platform adds IoT monitoring. MTI Global Services provides installation, preventive maintenance, break-fix field service and contact-center support across 70-plus countries, with offices in Hong Kong and London. The company holds its own patent portfolio and is ISO-27001 certified.
Patent-litigation posture. MTI appears in our tracked data only as a defendant, in one case and zero as plaintiff. That signature — a single defensive suit against a product competitor — is consistent with an operating company being attacked, not a patent assertion entity.
Notable case and context. The tracked matter is InVue Security Products, Inc. v. Mobile Tech, Inc., filed 2016-10-25 in the Western District of North Carolina, Charlotte Division. InVue (Charlotte, NC), a competing retail-security vendor, asserted merchandise-security-system patents. Public dockets outside our tracked list indicate the dispute became two-way: MTI counterclaimed and filed its own W.D.N.C. actions in 2018, the cases were consolidated and transferred to the District of Oregon (MTI's home forum), and MTI challenged the patents via IPR and ex parte reexamination. We do not speculate on the merits, and venue was not the Eastern District of Texas.
InVue asserted the '110 patent against Mobile Tech on the day the patent issued. The W.D.N.C. case was later consolidated with related actions involving patents related to the '110 patent and transferred to the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon.