Mobile Tech, Inc. d/b/a Mobile Technologies Inc. and MTI

Mobile Tech, Inc. (d/b/a Mobile Technologies Inc. and MTI) is a privately held, private-equity-backed manufacturer headquartered at 1050 NW 229th Ave, Hillsboro, Oregon, with additional offices in North America, Hong Kong, Ireland (Drogheda) and previously London. Sources give the founding year as 1977 (company press release) or 1979 (CB Insights); the company has described itself as having "over 45 years" of history. It was formerly named Merchandising Technologies, Inc. and was a portfolio company of Hammond, Kennedy, Whitney & Company (HKW) from 2013 before Vestar Capital Partners acquired it in August 2016 in partnership with management. PitchBook lists roughly 901 employees (2023) and records a further acquisition dated May 2024; the identity of that buyer could not be verified.

Operations. MTI makes retail loss-prevention, display-security and enterprise-mobility hardware, software and services. Product lines include Freedom™ and Freedom Micro® tethers/alarms, IntelliKey™ and other smart locks and managed-access systems, Secure Plug® merchandising, AP-series alarm products, tablet enclosures and mounts sold under the ArmorActive brand, mobile carts, RapidDoc® and Pipeline™ kiosk systems, and the MTI Connect® / ConnectedStore™ IoT cloud platform. Its Global Services division provides installation, preventive maintenance, break-fix and contact-center support in over 70–90 countries. Customers are primarily consumer-electronics retailers, carriers and OEM brands; Apollo lists ISO-27001 certification. The company holds numerous U.S. patents and trademarks, including on tether/alarm, smart-lock and wireless power/data-transfer technology.

Litigation posture. MTI is an operating company defendant, not an NPE. The tracked docket contains a single suit — InVue Security Products Inc. v. Mobile Tech, Inc., filed 2018-08-28 in the S.D. Indiana and transferred to the District of Oregon — with zero plaintiff-side cases in this dataset. The dispute is a two-way commercial rivalry: MTI also filed numerous IPR petitions (e.g., IPR2016-00892, IPR2016-00895/00896, IPR2017-00344/00345, IPR2016-01915) challenging InVue retail-security patents, and a Federal Circuit appeal (2018-1597) followed. The Indiana filing reflects MTI's principal place of business rather than a plaintiff-friendly NPE venue.