Category: IoT

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Pitch Deck Teardown: Sateliot’s $11.4M Series A deck

You know what really sucks? Your IoT devices not being able to phone home. Rarely a problem when you’re in the center of a well-populated urban center with oodles of cell towers, but think of that water temperature buoy floating around in the Atlantic, an autonomous drone flying above the rain forest or a glacier-creep measuring sonde high up in the mountains. The fact is that about 90% of the planet has no cell coverage at all, and Sateliot raised a €10 million ($11.4 million) round of funding to change that.

The company shared its pitch deck with us to take a deeper look, and so we will! Here’s the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck.

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. 

Slides in this deck

Sateliot’s deck consists of 18 slides and is almost as pitched; the company redacted some of the info that goes into depth about how its tech works.

  1. Cover slide
  2. “90% of the world has no cellular coverage” — problem slide
  3. Team slide
  4. “To connect all NB-IOT devices from space under 5G standard” — solution slide
  5. “Near real-time connectivity” — value proposition slide
  6. “Standard protocol” — product slide
  7. “Sateliot is the #1 satellite operator” — “why us?” slide
  8. Market size slide
  9. Competition slide
  10.  Business model slide
  11.  “MNOs engaged and technical integrations ongoing” — traction slide
  12.  “Early adopters program” — go-to-market slide
  13.  Interstitial slide
  14.  Benefit slide
  15.  Progress slide
  16.  NGO program slide
  17.  Slogan slide
  18.  Closing slide

Three things to love

It’s always interesting to see companies that are trying to have an enormous impact on the space they operate in. Sateliot is making space for an incredible opportunity, essentially removing the need for infrastructure to make IoT solutions work from pretty much anywhere in the world with a clear view of the sky. It’s a story that could be told in so many ways, and I was excited to see how the company launched into things.

Clear vision of the opportunity

[Slide 2] Crisp and easy. Image Credits: Sateliot

I love a deck that very clearly states the problem it is solving, especially if it’s also able to highlight the advantage of solving that problem. Sateliot does that fantastically on its second slide — 90% of the world has no cell coverage, and this company is promising to change that. There’s not an investor in the world that won’t be able to see the benefit and financial potential of that.

As a startup, if you can distill your problem, solution and opportunity this elegantly, you’ve got yourself a great launchpad to start weaving your narrative for your pitch.

“Why us?” This is why…

[Slide 7] Being the right team for the job is a crucial aspect of pitching. This is hella compelling. Image Credits: Sateliot

If you have some reason why nobody else can truly solve the problem as well as you can, shout about it. It makes you a far more tempting investment target.

One of the big questions an investor will be asking themselves is whether a particular company is well positioned to take charge of a market. In other words: Is there something about this team or company that gives them an unfair advantage over the competitors? This slide is labeled as “value proposition,” which is a little confusing. The slide doesn’t describe a value prop but a competitive advantage. It describes the “number of contributions to the 3GPP Standard,” but it doesn’t say what that means. Wikipedia has an answer that seems to indicate that this is very relevant, but I’d love for the company to have contextualized it on this slide.

Those caveats aside: If it turns out that contributions to the standard are directly relevant to the company’s success and show that it’s particularly well positioned to corner this market, this absolute design disaster and word soup of a slide might actually be a powerful storytelling device.

Scanning down the lists of companies that have made more and fewer contributions, there are a lot of big-name vendors. Seeing Sateliot in the top 25 or so — ahead of many other well-known companies — could suggest that there’s a significant moat in place.

I wish the company had connected the dots for me, but if this slide means what I suspect it means, it makes up for the distinctly subpar “team” slide (which we’ll discuss in a bit).

As a startup, what you can learn here is that if you have a moat, or some reason why nobody else can truly solve the problem at hand as well as you can, shout about it loudly — it makes you a far more tempting investment target.

Strong social mission

[Slide 14] Having a social mission component can help give investors the warm-and-fuzzies. Image Credits: Sateliot

Some investors have a social responsibility mandate as part of their investment theses. That could go in your favor if your company is in alignment with doing good in addition to doing well. But what is also true is that all investors are human beings, and it can never harm to have a heart-forward aspect to your story. Sateliot explains that once its satellites are up and running, there is almost no marginal cost to being able to offer its services to certain customer groups. In other words: If you want to GPS-track rhinos, you can do so for almost no money.

As I said, that doesn’t matter to all investors, but in this case, you’re creating a win-win. Zero marginal cost means that there’s no real downside to offering the company’s services to causes that improve the planet and plenty of potential upsides. In addition to making the world a better place, there are PR opportunities, ESG advantages and secondary benefits to the company. Sateliot could very easily not have included this in its story, but it makes me happier that they did.

The lesson here is to think about whether you can tell your story in ways that appeal to audiences in multiple ways. Giving an investor the chance to brag about a company they invested in that’s doing some good in the world can never harm, so if that’s true for you (and it is a natural, logical part of the story), then why not throw it into the mix?

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Sateliot could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Pitch Deck Teardown: Sateliot’s $11.4M Series A deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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SecuriThings is bringing order to IoT device management with $21M investment

As companies deploy more security devices like cameras, access control systems, intercoms and many other tools throughout their organizations, they are often disconnected from traditional IT, and may lack any way of managing the equipment in a systematic way. SecuriThings has built a solution to solve this problem with a platform that helps building operations understand and control what’s happening on physical security devices across a company.

Today the company announced a $21 million Series B.

Roy Dagan, company CEO and co-founder, says that while companies are spending inordinate amounts of money on this equipment, they often don’t know if they are even working because they lack visibility. “We built the ultimate system to help them automate the management of these devices at scale, and really provide the equivalent of an IT type of system for managing these kinds of devices,” Dagan told TechCrunch.

The system automates a bunch of management tasks that are typically done manually including firmware upgrades, managing certificates and rotating passwords. What’s more, it can help find and troubleshoot issues with these devices as they happen.

“It can also perform things like root cause analysis. So we can tell when an issue occurs, and we can tell you what’s at fault,” he said.

“You may think it’s a [camera], but it’s actually a switch and it’s affecting 15 [cameras], which are all down.

And that’s a problem because while building operations manages the broken cameras, the broken switch is under the purview of IT, and they need to know about it to fix it. SecuriThings includes ways to communicate with IT about these issues.

“You can collaborate with your counterparts in IT. So it can be integrated with ServiceNow or other ticketing systems…and that helps you also start working better with the rest of the enterprise,” Dagan said.

He believes that in spite of the economic uncertainty we are seeing, his company is well positioned to deal with it. “One of the cool business outcomes is really around cost reduction. Because if you look at the enterprise, and you look at the amount of spend they have today on these devices, and the way things are done manually and reactively, it’s almost a no brainer. The cost savings are huge,” he said.

While he wouldn’t discuss revenue growth, he said the company currently has dozens of customers using the platform and the number of customers has grown over 300% year over year.

The startup currently has 70 employees with plans to add more with the new investment. He says that being diverse is built into the company’s values. “So it’s just part of our culture, and it’s core to the company. It really is, and just looking at stats that we have today where 40% of leadership is female, and 40% of the company is female…But then also our HR team is constantly evaluating the numbers and looking at different opportunities and how we create that diversity even more,” he said.

Today’s investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and participation from Swisscom Ventures existing investors Aleph, Firstime VC and Cresson Management. The startup reports it has now raised a total of $39 million.

SecuriThings snares $14M Series A to keep edge devices under control

SecuriThings is bringing order to IoT device management with $21M investment by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Samsung and Google partner to speed up Matter-enable smart home setups

Samsung and Google announced a new partnership today that will allow easier setup for Matter-enabled devices on both Samsung SmartThings and Google Home systems.

At the Samsung Developer Conference held in San Fransisco, the Korean tech giant said that it will update its SmartThings app in the coming months so that users can onboard Matter-enabled devices even if they are set up in Google’s ecosystem and vice versa.

For the uninitiated, Matter is an Internet of Things standard that’s being developed by companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung to ensure smart home devices from different companies work across ecosystems. Last week the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the consortium behind Matter, officially approved the first set of specifications so developers can apply for certification for their solutions.

Samsung said it’s using Matter’s multi-admin capabilities to make compatible devices easy to find and control across different apps. Once the company updates the SmartThings apps, users can see Matter-enabled devices that were set up under Google’s ecosystem and then import them into Samsung’s ecosystem and vice versa. This way, users will be able to control these devices from either the Samsung SmartThings app or the Google Home app.

“As the largest Android developer, Samsung values its strong partnership with Google. Providing users with greater flexibility through this new multi-admin feature is a natural progression in our evolution as partners, allowing us to better support our massive existing and potential user base with both Samsung and Google products,” Jaeyeon Jung, Corporate VP and Head of SmartThings at Samsung said in a statement.

Samsung and Google partner to speed up Matter-enable smart home setups by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Building products in the Metaverse – Mitchell Bayer-Goldman on The Product Experience

What is the Metaverse and how can it help product managers in their daily craft? To help us make sense of the movement, Lily and Randy talked with Mitchell Bayer-Goldman to help us unpack all of the buzzwords and complexities about the Metaverse, and why we as product managers should note of where the concept is going. Bonus points for how many times we mention the word "Metaverse"!  [...] Read more »

The post Building products in the Metaverse – Mitchell Bayer-Goldman on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

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Industrial IoT startup Litmus Automation bags new cash to grow its product

In recent years, a cottage industry has sprung up around the industrial internet of things (IoT) landscape — and the data generated by it. It’s already overfull with platforms recording, analyzing and acting on data from temperature, motion and other sensors along those lines in buildings, warehouses and factories. Companies like Dabbel are attempting to automate HVAC controls in commercial buildings to cut CO2, while startups such as Traction and Augury offer products that plug into existing machinery to predict wear and tear. Amazon’s even thrown its hat in the ring with Lookout for Equipment, launched in April, which ingests sensor data from industrial equipment and then trains an algorithm to anticipate machine failure.

Despite the crowdedness in the industrial IoT sector, Vatsal Shah argues that there’s room for one more competitor. He’s somewhat biased in this belief given that he’s the co-founder of Litmus Automation, which helps manufacturers collect edge device data so they can use it for applications such as AI. But proving his point somewhat, Litmus today closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by industrial automation company Belden, $20 million of which came from Belden and $10 million of which was furnished by a “large strategic” investor that Shah wouldn’t reveal by name.

The fresh capital brings Litmus’s total raised to $42.6 million to date.

“The idea for Litmus came to me based on my experience at Rockwell Automation as an industrial design engineer,” Shah told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I was working on one of the largest oil and gas pipeline projects in the world, where collecting pipeline data from heterogenous industrial systems and storing it in a simple database took over six months of development. I realized these complexities were only going to increase with the growing data siloes and the introduction of many more connected devices.”

Litmus Automation

Image Credits: Litmus Automation

After recruiting Purdue classmate John Younes as a co-founder, who in turn brought on longtime friend Sacha Sawaya, Shah launched Litmus in 2014.

“I identified the need for a platform to seamlessly collect data from many different types of industrial systems and devices to make it available to third-party applications efficiently and with intelligence in between,” Shah continued. “The biggest challenge enterprise companies face is access to the data they need to fuel machine learning and AI models. This is something Litmus specializes in.”

To this end, Litmus can collect data to feed AI and machine learning models and then run those models at the “edge” (e.g., a warehouse or manufacturing plant). For example, one customer, Taiwan-based Chimei, uses Litmus to run multiple AI models on the same edge device, store data at the edge, run analytics, visualize data and send data to existing enterprise storage systems and apps.

Shah claims that tens of thousands of devices are connected to the Litmus platform today, generating millions of data points across hundreds of customers and over 500 plants and sites.

“What’s interesting about our investors is they are not VC firms — these are technology companies who believe in our tech and have invested as a result,” he said, noting that Mitsubishi is among Litmus’s previous backers.

Assuming that’s true, Litmus might well be set up for success despite the competition and tough macroeconomic climate. Last year certainly set the stage, when VCs poured more than $1.4 billion into the industrial IoT space, according to Crunchbase — up from $1.7 billion in 2020.

Shah says the majority of the Series B tranche will go toward expanding 75-employee Litmus’s go-to-market efforts and “scaling to support enterprise customers globally.”

Industrial IoT startup Litmus Automation bags new cash to grow its product by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Drover AI’s Alex Nesic on using tech to regulate the scooter market

As shared micromobility continues to take over cities, operators have found themselves implementing different forms of scooter “advanced rider assistance systems” or scooter ARAS, that can detect when a rider is doing the thing cities hate most — riding on the sidewalk.

Drover AI, a startup that had the gumption to launch in May 2020, is one of the companies enabling this trend to take off. The startup builds computer vision IoT modules that have been mounted on scooters from the likes of Spin, Voi and Beam. The modules are built with cameras that use machine learning to detect things like sidewalks, bike lanes and pedestrians, which then send that data back to the scooter’s brain in order to send the riders alerts or, in some cases, actually slow them down.

Alex Nesic, one of the founders of Drover AI and its CEO, didn’t always have a burning passion for AI or computer vision. In fact, Nesic spent the better part of the aughts as an actor, appearing in TV shows like “Sleeper Cell” and “CSI” (Miami and New York!). But Nesic enjoyed chemistry in high school and was good at converting tech speak into actionable marketing language, so he jumped at the opportunity to get involved in a high school friend’s venture that dealt with nanotechnology and surface modification chemistry.

After rising up the ladder fairly quickly until he reached the role of VP, Nesic got pulled into the mobility sphere by a company called Immotor, which probably launched about five years too early to be successful. Immotor built a three-wheeled portable scooter with swappable batteries and was connected to an app via Bluetooth.

“The fact that operators and even manufacturers are trying to replicate our approach is very validating.” Alex Nesic, Drover AI CEO

“I would travel with it because the batteries were TSA-compliant, and I would put it in the overhead bin and it was my introduction to moving through cities with micromobility that I could carry with me everywhere,” said Nesic.

This was around the time that Bird started launching shared scooters, so the market wasn’t yet ready for a $1,500 consumer-facing scooter that was being lumped more into the hoverboard category than a useful transportation device.

So Nesic pivoted and founded Clevr Mobility, a shared e-scooter operator that also provided a turnkey solution for cities and other private operators. Nesic said that Clevr was one of the first companies to start the conversation around detecting and geofencing sidewalks, only it was relying on GPS to try to achieve submeter accuracy. It was the failure to actually do so that led Nesic to denounce the inadequacies of GPS and go on to found Drover AI, which meets the demand for precise location awareness using computer vision instead.

We sat down with Nesic to discuss the possibilities of integrating computer vision tech into privately owned scooters, what it means when a larger company steals your idea and why tech pedigrees are overrated when it comes to running a startup.

Editor’s note: The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: You closed a $5.4 million Series A in July, and at the time you told me the money would go toward your next-gen product but also toward exploring other integrations farther up the supply chain with vehicle manufacturers.

Alex Nesic: The end game for me is also to try to help inform the regulatory environment because it’s not reasonable to expect there to be two different sets of rules for the shared operators and private scooter owners. Operators are constrained and have all these hoops to jump through, but then anybody can buy something on Amazon that doesn’t offer any similar safety features.

Drover AI’s Alex Nesic on using tech to regulate the scooter market by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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Google Cloud will shutter its IoT Core service next year

Google Cloud announced this week that it’s shutting down its IoT Core service, giving customers a year to move to a partner to manage their IoT devices.

The announcement appeared at the top of the IoT Core web page this week with little fanfare. The company also sent an email to customers announcing the change.

It believes that having partners manage the process for customers is a better way to go. “Since launching IoT Core, it has become clear that our customers’ needs could be better served by our network of partners that specialize in IoT applications and services,” a Google spokesperson explained.

Google is also keenly aware of its reputation for suddenly shutting down services, and the Google Cloud spokesperson was careful to point out that they are trying to make the move as seamless as possible for customers. “We have worked extensively to provide customers with migration options and solution alternatives, and are providing a year-long runway before IoT Core is discontinued.”

That may be so, but it certainly didn’t appease commenters on Hacker News, who were highly critical of the news, and questioned Google Cloud’s commitment to its customers.

Competitors AWS and Microsoft offer similar services, which provide a way for customers to manage their IoT devices, while ingesting and making sense of all of the data coming in from those devices.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller found it intriguing that Google was shutting down this particular service after all the IoT hype we’ve been hearing in recent years. “It’s interesting. IoT was supposed to be this big driver for cloud loads for the cloud vendors,” he said.

Mueller said that the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — haven’t had much innovation on IoT services. “All three have been kind of standing still on their offerings, which has allowed the best-of-breed and specialized vendors to catch up. Now those specialized IoT vendors run on the big three cloud infrastructure, and they get those workloads anyway without the investment and maintenance of a software platform,” he said. But so far, only Google has announced it’s deprecating its IoT core service.

Ultimately, this could have to do with the mounting losses that the company has been facing in the cloud division as it works to catch up with rivals Amazon and Microsoft. The investment seems to be working with the company reporting over $6 billion in revenue in its most recent earnings report last month, up from $4.6 billion the prior year. But the division also reported losses of $858 million, a much wider gap than the prior year’s $591 million loss.

It’s worth noting that the cloud infrastructure market more broadly is growing rapidly and Google could be investing heavily to get a bigger piece of that over time, while tolerating losses in the short term. Synergy Research reported last month that the market was worth almost $55 billion last quarter with Google accounting for 10% of that. That was good for third place behind Amazon with 34% and Microsoft with 21%. The market, which includes infrastructure as a service, platform as a service along with hosted private cloud services, grew 31% in Q2 2022. (Google Cloud’s $6B figure includes additional services beyond the ones Synergy counts, hence the difference  between Synergy’s number, and what Alphabet reported for Google Cloud revenue.)

Google published a blog post last July outlining its core tenets when it comes to changing or shutting down a service. To that end, the company stated, “If a deprecation or breaking change is inevitable, then the burden is on us to make the migration as effortless as possible.”

Regardless of the written policy, customers like the ones on Hacker News are feeling like they’ve been left in the lurch. To a large extent commenters see this as a trust issue, and Google Cloud will need to address that, especially as it tries to grow the division.

With a $22B run rate, does it matter if Google Cloud still loses money?

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Here’s what Swarm has been up to in the 10 months since being acquired by SpaceX

It’s been nearly a year since satellite Internet-of-Things connectivity provider Swarm was acquired by SpaceX, and Swarm co-founder and CEO Sara Spangelo (now senior director of Satellite Engineering at SpaceX) is ready to talk about what Swarm’s been up to in that time. SpaceX is not known to be a super acquisitive company, so I was curious to hear about what it’s been like for Spangelo and for Swarm. Mostly, it’s been 10 months of rapid acceleration, she says.

One of Swarm’s biggest blockers in terms of speed of deployment and growing its network was the ability to actually launch its satellites, which themselves are tiny — the company says they’re “the smallest operational satellites in space,” at little more than the size of your average sandwich. Spangelo said that unlocking launch availability has been one of the biggest benefits of operating under the SpaceX umbrella so far.

“Access to basically free launch is pretty exciting,” she told me in an interview. “We actually have launched probably three or four times since we last spoke [Editor’s note: in June 2021 for our Found podcast], and we now have over 160 satellites in LEO [low-Earth orbit] — some of those are experimental.”

Those experimental payloads have helped the company improve its overall latency, so now it can guarantee latency at under one hour (meaning a Swarm satellite passes overhead any given point on Earth at least once an hour), which opens up broad new customer categories and applications for its low-bandwidth, hyperefficient connectivity services.

“That’s a pretty important threshold, if you’re doing any sort of monitoring, whether it’s floods, water, forest fire detection, agriculture applications, logistics applications — that’s like a pretty important threshold in that community,” Spangelo explained. “So being low [latency], that has unlocked a bunch of exciting new use cases and customers.”

Swarm’s tiny satellites have essentially been hitching a ride on SpaceX launches for other customers, where it’s easy for the company “to just pop them on” in Spangelo’s words. Satellite launch tends to be a game of ounces because of weight considerations, but the benefits of being the smallest operational satellites in space mean that you stand a better chance than most of fitting within existing mission payload parameters for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets even with other cargo on board.

While access to regular orbital delivery service is incredibly valuable to a technology like Swarm’s, Spangelo says that it’s also unlocked a host of other efficiencies that help the previously small startup leap ahead in terms of its maturation and infrastructure.

“We’ve had access to just more support systems,” she said. “So legal, accounting, HR, recruiting, logistics, supply chain and production. That’s also helped us accelerate a lot of our production rate, [and] our hiring rate. We’ve been scaling up and we’ll probably do 10x the number of devices sold this year vs. what we did last year.”

Of course, it’s a two-way street (it wouldn’t make much sense as an acquisition otherwise) and Spangelo says SpaceX is already benefiting plenty, too.

“We’re also supporting SpaceX in a bunch of ways, from engineering and technology, and regulatory strategies, to lots of other programs that hopefully we get to talk about in the future,” she said, reserving details on just what those programs might entail for now. I suggested that some kind of marriage between Starlink’s consumer internet service and Swarm’s connected device offerings might make sense, and she did agree that there are synergies they’re exploring there.

“We’re definitely having product discussions across the chasm that is Starlink broadband, to Swarm IoT and everything in between,” she said. “And the roadmap really fills in a lot of the gaps between those things that you’re hinting at. Certainly on the enterprise side, we’ve started to engage with some of the same enterprise customers. You can imagine big agriculture companies, or oil and gas, or maritime companies have need for broadband, as well as for satellite IoT. So we’ve definitely been able to benefit from those mutual relationships really both ways: Some Swarm customers are interested in Starlink, and vice versa.”

With new use cases and new sales relationships, as well as plenty of demand on both sides, Spangelo says both Starlink and Swarm within SpaceX are still growing their teams despite the current macroeconomic conditions, especially when it comes to specific types of talent.

“A lot of people don’t know that Starlink is actually kind of a networking company,” she said. “We think of [SpaceX] as a hardware rocket company — a bunch of mechanical engineers. But the sophistication of the software, networking algorithms, back ends at the core networks and laser mesh networks, it’s incredibly complicated. So we have, I think, over 200 software engineers on Starlink, and 500 or so at [SpaceX]. But we are definitely looking for incredible talent there.”

As for what Spangelo is excited that Swarm has been able to do, and do better, working as a SpaceX company, she mentioned a number of new use cases that have come online since we last spoke, including wildfire detection. With a max of under one hour of latency, and often results that refresh in minutes, you can change considerably the approach to detection and mitigation of wildfires, which can spread for hours or even days without people knowing when monitored only through traditional methods. Swarm is working with a number of companies there, including Berlin-based Dryad Networks.

Another recent customer, Rainforest Connection, uses Swarm’s IoT network to connect simple acoustic sensors deployed in the Brazilian rainforest.

“Basically, they have just an acoustic sensor, like you have on your phone, and it basically just hears a chainsaw, and then calls in the people that will stop the [deforestation],” she said. “That one is just so cool to me — that such a simple sensor can have like such a big impact, because it’s so hard to find these things.”

As for what the future holds for Swarm, Spangelo says that they’re actually pretty pleased with where the satellite hardware and design is currently, though they’re looking to build more software products for enterprise customers. There are also “some products that are more standalone that are actually more appropriate for tracking use cases, and some of the bigger enterprise use cases” that don’t require the sophisticated integration of their current modem design, she said, something more “on brand with” Elon Musk’s “out of the box philosophy”; something she said has already had influence on the product side.

Meanwhile Swarm continues to operate out of its facility in Mountain View, just a short distance from a nearby SpaceX office, making collaboration relatively simple. The Falcon 9 launch pads are a little farther away, but you can’t beat the price for the ride.

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Zededa lands a cash infusion to expand its edge device management software

Factors like latency, bandwidth, security and privacy are driving the adoption of edge computing, which aims to process data closer to where it’s being generated. Consider a temperature sensor in a shipyard or a fleet of cameras in a fulfillment center. Normally, the data from them might have to be relayed to a server for analysis. But with an edge computing setup, the data can be processed on-site, eliminating cloud computing costs and enabling processing at greater speeds and volumes (in theory).

Technical challenges can stand in the way of successful edge computing deployments, however. That’s according to Said Ouissal, the CEO of Zededa, which provides distributed edge orchestration and virtualization software. Ouissal has a product to sell — Zededa works with customers to help manage edge devices — but he points to Zededa’s growth to support his claim. The number of edge devices under the company’s management grew 4x in the past year while Zededa’s revenue grew 7x, Ouissal says.

Zededa’s success in securing cash during a downturn, too, suggests that the edge computing market is robust. The company raised $26 million in Series B funding, Zededa today announced, contributed by a range of investors including Coast Range Capital, Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Almaz Capital, Porsche Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Juniper Networks, Rockwell Automation, Samsung Next and EDF North America Ventures.

“There were two main trends that led to Zededa’s founding,” Ouissal told TechCrunch in an email interview. “First, as more devices, people and locations were increasingly being connected, unprecedented amounts of data were being generated … Secondly, the sheer scale and diversity of what was happening at the edge would be impossible for organizations to manage in a per-use case fashion. The only successful way to manage this type of environment was for organizations to have visibility across all the hardware, applications, clouds and networks distributed across their edge environments, just like they have in the data center or cloud.”

Ouissal co-founded Zededa in 2016 alongside Erik Nordmark, Roman Shaposhnik and Vijay Tapaskar. Previously, Ouissal was the VP of strategy and customer management at Ericsson and a product manager at Juniper Networks. Nordmark was a distinguished engineer at Cisco, while Shaposhnik — also an engineer by training — spent years developing cloud architectures at Sun Microsystems, Huawei, Yahoo and Cloudera.

Zededa’s software-as-a-service product, with works with devices from brands like SuperMicro, monitors edge installations to ensure they’re working as intended. It also guides users through the deployment steps, leveraging open source projects designed for Internet of Things orchestration and cyber defense. Zededa’s tech stack, for example, builds on the Linux Foundation’s EVE-OS, an open Linux-based operating system for distributed edge computing.

Zededa

Image Credits: Zededa

Zededa aims to support most white-labeled devices offered by major OEMs; its vendor-agnostic software can be deployed on any bare-metal hardware or within a virtual machine to provide orchestration services and run apps. According to Ouissal, use cases range from monitoring sensors and security cameras to regularly upgrading the software in cell towers.

“The C-suite understands that digital transformation is critical to their organization’s success, particularly for organizations with distributed operations, and digital transformation cannot happen without edge computing. The ability to collect, analyze and act upon data at the distributed edge makes it possible for businesses to increase their competitive advantage, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, open up new revenue streams and operate within safer and more secure environments,” Ouissal said. “As a result of this, edge computing projects are accelerating within organizations.”

Some research bears this out. According to a June 2021 Eclipse Foundation poll, 54% of organizations surveyed were either using or planning to use edge computing technologies within the next 12 months. A recent IDC report, meanwhile, forecasts double-digit growth in investments in edge computing over the next few years.

Zededa’s customers are primarily in the IT infrastructure, industrial automation and oil and gas industries. Ouissal wouldn’t say how many the company has currently but asserted that Zededa remains sufficiently differentiated from rivals in the edge device orchestration space.

“In terms of the ‘IT down’ trajectory, we are complementary to data solutions from the likes of VMware, SUSE, Nutanix, Red Hat and Sunlight, but these solutions are not suitable for deployments outside of secure data centers. From the ‘OT up’ standpoint, adjacent competitors include the likes of Balena, Portainer and Canonical’s Ubuntu Core. However, these solutions are more suitable for ‘greenfield’ use cases that only require containers and lack the security required for true enterprise and industrial deployments,” Ouissal argued. “Despite the economic downturn, the strategic and transformative potential of edge computing to create new business opportunities is leading investors across verticals to increase their commitment, at a time when they may be more reluctant to invest in other avenues.”

In any case, Zededa, which has a roughly 100-person team spread across the U.S., Germany and India, is actively hiring and plans to expand its R&D, sales and marketing teams within the year, Ouissal said. To date, the eight-year-old startup has raised a total of $55.4 million in venture capital.

“[We aim to increase] the use cases and integrations that we support. Within our product, we will continue to focus on innovation to improve ease of use and security. As the edge computing market evolves and matures,” Ouissal said. “We are also focused on enabling applications including updating legacy applications and bringing new solutions to the market that simplify technologies like AI and machine learning.”