'Obama for America'’s tech team sets sights on making mobile retail easier

A new startup, Modest, has created a platform that lets businesses build better smartphone-based retail apps. The company was founded by the folks behind the Obama for America campaign. Modest is set to publicly throw open its doors to those beyond the handful of companies that it already works with and announce that its lead investor is Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google.

The company has already drawn an undisclosed sum of investment from the likes of Pritzker Group Venture Capital, 500 Startups, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and even Dirk Elmendorf, the founder of Rackspace. “At Obama for America, we were a bunch of smart engineers and we had amazing marketing people and everyone was the best in the world and we had millions of dollars to spend, but if you're a bakery down the street you don't,” Reed said. “We're not here to build a solution that works for giant enterprise, we're here for the retailer down the street.”