Category: IoT

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Onomondo secures cash to expand its wireless network for IoT devices

Onomondo, a startup offering a dedicated wireless network for internet of things (IoT) devices, today announced that it raised $21 million in a funding round led by Verdane with participation from Maersk Growth, People Ventures, and The Danish Growth Fund. In an email, CEO Michael Karlsen told TechCrunch that the new cash will be put toward productization, go-to-market efforts, and marketing as Onomondo scales its team from 50 people to around 100 by the end of the year.

Karlsen co-founded Onomondo in 2012 alongside Henrik Aagaard with the goal of, in Karlsen’s words, “expanding the capabilities of what a network can solve for IoT.” Onomondo built a wireless network for IoT devices on the back of hundreds of cellular providers that operates in over 180 countries.

Prior to co-launching Onomondo, Karlsen was the CFO at indie game studio Playdead and co-founded Tel42, a Danish network wholesaler on the Danish Telenor network. Aagaard was the CTO at Tel42 until it was acquired by IoT services provider Greenwave Systems.

“Our solution is unique to the market as … we’ve built and operate our own network core from the ground up, which offers end-to-end control and visibility from any cellular antenna across the world to any cloud,” Karlsen told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We have built an IoT tech stack with a set of unique power tools on top, which makes the service fundamentally different from anything else available on the market today.”

Onomondo

Image Credits: Onomondo

A network reserved for IoT devices isn’t a novel concept. London-based FloLive built a cloud-based solution to stitch together private, local cellular networks for IoT connectivity. Helium and Kepler Communications eschewed cellular for other technologies, such as miniature satellites and “LongFi,” to help IoT devices talk to each other. Major players like Comcast, SoftBank, Orange, SKT, KPN, Swisscom, Verizon, Vodafone were at one point creating or maintaining nationwide IoT networks, as well, not to mention Amazon and Samsung.

Dedicated IoT networks offer several advantages over traditional cellular, Karlsen argues. For example, mobile phone networks aren’t typically battery-efficient because devices on the network must communicate frequently with cell towers. By contrast, networks like Onomondo are optimized for long-range data transfers and very low power consumption, and — at least in Onomondo’s case — only charge for data when devices are active.

“The IoT market has almost been conditioned to think of connectivity as something that needs to be designed around and ‘made to fit,’ which has become the status quo and normalized,” Karlsen said. “So, when we tell our customers they can also use the network to double their devices’ lifetime, half battery consumption, lower data consumption by 90%, drive down debugging time, cut costs and increase stability with nothing but a network change, that’s when people really start to listen and realize the power that lies in controlling the full network architecture and tailoring that to IoT.”

When a customer installs one of Onomondo’s SIM cards in their IoT devices, information about each device is sent to the cloud. As the devices move from one country to the next, the platform automatically routes the connection through the local network infrastructure. The device doesn’t need to update itself or share sensitive data with local networks, and the device owner stays in control, Karlsen claims.

Pål Malmros, a partner at Verdane, said that companies in “asset-rich” industries like transport, manufacturing, and logistics are the target for Onomondo’s technology. “[These industries] have long attempted to harness IoT to manage supply chains, improve automation, and drive efficiency,” he told TechCrunch in an email Q&A. “By redesigning existing connectivity architecture to create a single virtualized IoT network, without reliance on the traditional operator network stack, the Onomondo team is bringing a fresh, next-generation approach to the challenges the IoT market continues to face.”

It’s a tough market indeed. In January, Sigfox, a French IoT startup that had raised more than $300 million, filed for bankruptcy protection as the pandemic sharply depressed sales. The company blamed the global chip shortage, in part, for squeezing the larger electronic components market and — by extension — the demand for IoT device networks.

Onomondo

Image Credits: Onomondo

But Karlsen insists that Onomondo remains resilient, onboarding around 50 new customers per quarter. Current customers include Bosch, Carlsberg, and Maersk.

“Business in the first quarter of 2022 was solid and we saw an x4 increase in new customer intake as well as continued triple-digit yeasr-over-year growth within our existing customer base compared to 2021,” Karlsen said. “With this new funding, we are looking to meet our planned projection of tripling our ARR twice over the next two years … [It’ll] allow us to accelerate our strategy and capture more market share predominantly in Europe.”

To date, Onomondo has raised more than $26 million in capital.

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Tractian, which uses AI to monitor industrial equipment, raises $15M

Tractian, a startup developing a product to monitor the status of machines and electrical infrastructure, today announced that it closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Next47, with participation from Y Combinator and others. The money will be put toward product development and expanding Tractian’s workforce and geographic footprint, according to co-founder and co-CEO Igor Marinelli, as well as ongoing customer acquisition efforts.

Founded in 2019, Tractian is the brainchild of Y Combinator alumni Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas. Prior to starting Tractian, they worked at a paper manufacturer, International Paper, as software engineers, where Marinelli says they noticed how backwards the systems were for monitoring machinery health.

“Industrial managers of any kind need traceability of work orders, and need to know the health of their machines from kilometers away from the operations,” Marinelli said. “[W]ithout the proper combination of hardware and software, you can’t solve the industry’s real challenge.”

Tractian’s flagship product, which Marinelli says is patent pending in the U.S., uses AI to identify mechanical problems a machine might be having by analyzing its “rotational assets,” like motors, pumps and compressors. Tractian can spot signs of looseness, imbalance and misalignment from vibration and temperature anomalies measured by custom sensors, Marinelli claims, in addition to potential electrical failures.

Tractian provides sensors that attach to — and send data about — machines via 3G or 4G cellular networks. The company’s software provides checklist and inspection steps for each machine, plus diagnostics, recommendations, alerts and scheduling tools and inventories.

Tractian

Monitoring equipment with Tractian. Image Credits: Tractian

Marinelli readily acknowledges that Tractian isn’t the first to the machine analytics space. Predictive maintenance technologies have been used for decades in jet engines and gas turbines, and companies including Samsara, Augury, Upkeep and MaintainX offer solutions with capabilities similar to Tractian. In April, Amazon threw its hat in the ring with the general launch of Lookout for Equipment, a service that ingests sensor data from a customer’s industrial equipment and then trains a machine learning model to predict early warning signs of machine failure.

In a sign of the segment’s competitiveness, Augury just this month acquired Seebo, a startup that provided manufacturing teams with the insights to optimize their industrial processes. Augury is one of the better-funded startups in the sector, having raised nearly $300 million in venture capital to date.

But both Marinelli and Lameirinhas sense opportunity in a market that could be worth $12.3 billion by 2025. In 2018, Gartner predicted that by 2022, spend on internet of things-enabled predictive maintenance would increase to $12.9 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2018.

While Marinelli declined to go into detail when asked about the technical details of Tractian’s platform, including the accuracy of its algorithms, he noted that Tractian’s customer base of roughly 200 companies spans well-known brands like John Deere, Bosch, Embraer and Hyundai.

Looking ahead, the key for Tractian will be convincing would-be customers that its technology performs better than the rest. In a survey by McKinsey, analysts at the firm highlight the dangers of an under-performing predictive maintenance algorithm, claiming that one company saved over 10% on the breakdown of a piece of equipment using an algorithm but spent significantly more as a result of the algorithm’s high false-positive rate.

“[O]ur technology involves the same concept of Shazam, but for machines,” Marinelli said. [The pandemic especially] increased the necessity of real time monitoring of assets because many operators [can’t] be physically working [near them] for long periods of time.”

In March, Tractian announced its expansion to North America, opening a new office in Mexico with a team dedicated to developing the company’s activities there. Tractian plans to follow up with market entry in Atlanta, Georgia later this year.

When reached for comment, Debjit Mukerji, a partner at Next47 who plans to join Tractian’s board of directors, said: “This is a critical space, the heartbeat of our economy. Next47 is thrilled to join Tractian on its mission to transform the maintenance experience for enterprises globally. Having followed this space for years, we concluded that frictionless deployment, intuitive user interfaces and a mobile/cloud-first approach are essential ingredients of success, particularly in the underserved medium enterprise segment. Tractian combines these in its extraordinary product vision and consistently delights its customers.”

Tractian currently has 100 employees and it expects to expand its headcount to 200 in the next 18 months. The company’s total capital raised stands at $19 million; Marinelli demurred when asked about the valuation.

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Europe proposes rules for fair access to connected device data

The European Union has proposed an interesting addition to its fast updating digital rulebook today: The Data Act slots into an already ambitious digital policy framework with the goal of bringing clarity and fairness around the sharing of (mostly industrial) data generated by connected devices.

It won’t be the last word on this either, as the Commission is working on sector-specific regulations to plug into the Data Act (including one incoming within “weeks” for health data-sharing; and another in the works for connected cars).

But EU lawmakers said today that they intend the Data Act to be around for the long term.

“We wanted to make sure this was a horizontal text because it has to be a long term one, it has to be visible, it has to be clear in the long term,” noted internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, during a press conference.

The Data Act will address “the legal, economic and technical issues that lead to data being under-used”, the Commission said in a press release on the “Proposal for a Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data”; suggesting the legislation will “unlock the economic and societal potential of data and technologies in line with EU rules and values” by creating “a single market to allow data to flow freely within the EU and across sectors for the benefit of businesses, researchers, public administrations and society at large”.

Breton added that the Data Act, much like the Commission’s Digital Services Act proposal, is “cross-cutting, horizontal in nature, defines the rules” — aka a “basic tool box” — but will also be built upon with more specific rules for certain sectors, such as for connected cars. (And via ongoing work to devise “common European data spaces“.)

The Commission has a few different aims for the Data Act — here’s a quick overview:

Firstly, it wants to avoid the sensor-laden Internet of Things (IoT) further concentrating market power in the digital sphere by empowering consumers who own so-called ‘smart’ devices to be able to gain access to data generated by them; and order a manufacturer to provide their data in real-time to third parties of their choosing whose (non-competing) services they wish to take up.

The Commission hopes this will foster innovation, such as in aftermarket repairs or predictive maintenance.

It kicked off an investigation of the IoT sector back in July 2020 — saying at the time that it was concerned about the risks to competition and open markets linked to the data collection capabilities of connected devices.

The Data Act looks to be a key component of the EU’s response to that threat. (And during the press conference the Commission confirmed that tech giants who are deemed to be “gatekeepers” under its Digital Markets Act ex ante competition reform proposal won’t be able to make use of the Data Act to receive third party companies’ data — i.e. to avoid the risk of further entrenching their market power.)

Secondly, the Commission is concerned about abusive contractual terms being imposed on smaller companies by more powerful platforms and market players to, essentially, extract the less powerful company’s most valuable data — so the Data Act will bring in a “fairness test” with the goal of protecting SMEs against unfair contractual terms.

The legislation will stipulate a list of unilaterally imposed contractual clauses that are deemed or presumed to be unfair — such as a clause that states a company can unilaterally interpret the terms of the contract — and those that do not pass the test will be not be binding on SMEs.

The Commission says it will also develop and recommend non-binding model contractual terms, saying these standard clauses will help SMEs negotiate “fairer and balanced data sharing contracts with companies enjoying a significantly stronger bargaining position”.

Some major competition complaints lodged against tech giants in the EU have concerned their access to third party data, such as the investigation into Amazon’s use of merchants data, for example, and those investigations are likely influencing what the Commission is proposing here around contractual terms.

Thirdly, the Data Act takes aim at cloud service lock-in by proposing news rules intended to allow customers to effectively switch between different cloud data-processing services providers — combined with safeguards against unlawful data transfer, per the Commission.

Barriers to switching are a key, long-standing complaint in digital markets — where network effects can be further harnessed by follow-on lock-in tactics that add friction or even hard barriers to porting data, enabling a provider to maintain their earlier grip on market power.

EU lawmakers say they want to make it easier for businesses and consumers that are making use of cloud and edge service providers to be able to move their data and apps — whether a private photo archive or an entire business administration — from one provider to another without incurring any costs. To do that the Data Act proposes new contractual obligations for cloud providers, and a new standardisation framework for data and cloud interoperability.

Fourthly, the Commission wants the regulation to set clear rules for scenarios when governments/public sector organizations may want to access IoT data — such as in public emergencies.

The coronavirus crisis has clearly concentrated minds on this front where there was an imperative to access commercial mobility data (such as from mobile phones) to help policymakers assess responses to restrictions on people’s movements or otherwise model how the pandemic might spread.

The Data Act is extremely broad — applying to data generated across the EU in all economic sectors.

And while the Commission’s emphasis is on greasing the pipe to encourage the sharing of machine/industrial data, there can be plenty personal data generated by connected devices (just think of a smartwatch or a fitness band, for instance) — albeit, the sharing of any personal data would need to be done in compliance with the EU’s existing data protection framework, GDPR.

“The Data Act will remove barriers to access data, for both private and public sector bodies, while preserving incentives to invest in data generation by ensuring a balanced control over the data for its creators,” the Commission writes in a Q&A detailing its main goals for the proposal.

“It will unlock the value of data generated by connected objects in Europe, one of the key areas for innovation in the coming decades. It will clarify who can create value from such data and under which conditions. It will ensure fairness in the allocation of data value among the actors in the data economy and in their contracts while respecting the legitimate interests of companies and individuals that invest in data products and services. The new rules will empower consumers and companies by giving them a say on what can be done with the data generated by their connected products.”

An earlier EU proposal setting out a framework to govern and encourage industrial data-sharing, such as by setting the rules for data intermediaries — aka, the Data Governance Act (DGA) — has already been adopted.

The Commission says the Data Act to slots into that framework, helping to generate data flows to intermediaries — which it hopes will, in turn, fire up data-driven innovation across the bloc as part of its overarching goal of driving digital transformation as a strategy to fire economic growth.

Indeed, it says the new rules making more data available for reuse are expected to create €270BN of additional GDP by 2028.

The Commission also argues that better access to more real-time sensor data will be crucial in achieving the bloc’s climate goals and shrinking carbon emissions — to hit its 2050 ‘net zero’ target.

The Data Act proposal still needs the backing of the EU’s co-legislators — before it’s adopted and becomes regional law. But the relatively fast pace of the DGA’s passage suggests the Commission’s data strategy enjoys broad support.

Although it remains to be seen whether the proposal will attract any of the frenzied lobbying that other pieces of EU digital policy have attracted in recent years.

If well implemented the Data Act certainly certainly looks like it could be a boon to both consumers and startups.

In a statement welcoming the Commission proposal, BEUC, the European Consumer Organization, described the legislation as “essential” for consumers.

In a statement, Monique Goyens, its director general, added: “The Data Act is an important piece of the jigsaw to make sure data can be accessed fairly across industries while giving users full power to decide what happens to the data they generate. Beyond providing a framework in which data gets accessed and shared, the EU’s Data Act must complement existing data protection, consumer, and competition rules.

“It is essential that consumers decide what happens to the data they generate, when they share it and with whom. Consumers should have a simple-to-exercise data portability right, which extends beyond personal data, so that they can for example take all their data from one service to another if they want to. The EU must also ensure that the Data Act does not end up reinforcing Big Tech data monopolies.”

US giants top tech industry’s $100M+ a year lobbying blitz in EU

Europe lays out its plan to reboot digital rules and tame tech giants

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Daily Crunch: Google will offer G Suite legacy edition users a ‘no-cost option’

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 28, 2022! It’s nearly blizzard o’clock where I am, so please enjoy the following newsletter as my final missive before hunkering down. In happier and better news, TechCrunch Early Stage is coming up in just a few months and not only am I hype about it, I’ll hopefully be there IRL. See you soon! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Google invests up to $1B in Airtel: With a $700 million investment and $300 million in “multi-year commercial agreements” with Airtel, and Indian telco, Google has made its second major bet on Indian infra. Recall that Google also put money into Jio, another Indian telco. The deal underscores the importance of the country in the future of technology revenues.
  • What’s ahead for Europe: On the heels of news that European startups had an outsized 2021 when it came to fundraising, TechCrunch explored what’s ahead for the continent. Some expect a slowdown from peak activity, while others anticipate further acceleration. Regardless of which perspective you favor, European venture investment is expected to remain elevated for some time to come.
  • Zapp raises $200M: And speaking of European startups, Zapp, the U.K.-based quick-convenience delivery startup, just raised a massive Series B. The company previously raised $100 million, meaning that this round was big in absolute and comparative terms. As we see some consolidation in the fast-delivery space, this deal caught our eye.

Startups/VC

  • Are charter cities the future for African tech growth? TechCrunch’s Tage Kene-Okafor has a great piece up on the site noting that “African cities have the fastest global urban growth rate,” which is leading to overcrowding. Some folks think that “charter cities offer a solution.” Special economic zones of all types have been tried before – will they offer African tech a faster route forward?
  • Personalized learning is hot: Our in-house edtech expert Natasah Mascarenhas has a great piece out today on personalized learning startups – Learnfully, Wayfinder, Empowerly, and others – that are taking the lessons of remote schooling to heart and working to make products that work better for our kids. It’s an encouraging, fascinating story.
  • Rise wants to remake team calendaring: There is no shortage of apps in the market to help individuals and teams work together. But we might not need as many as we have. That’s why Rise is making me think. The team calendaring app just raised a few million, and could replace a few tools that myself and friends use. I wonder if the solution to the Tool Overload of 2022 is tools that do less, intentionally.
  • Canvas wants non-tech folks to be able to squeeze answers from data: Developers are in short supply, so no-code tools that allow folks who don’t sling code to do their own building are blowing up. Similarly, a general dearth of data science talent in the market is creating space for tools like Canvas, which “is going all in with a spreadsheet-like interface for non-technical teams to access the information they need without bothering data teams,” TechCrunch reports.
  • Zigbang buys Samsung IoT business: The IoT promises of yesteryear are coming true, and not. Samsara recently went public on the back of its IoT business. That was a win for the category. That Zigbang, a South Korean proptech startup, is buying Samsung’s IoT unit feels slightly less bullish.
  • Series F-tw? Once upon a time I would have mocked a Series F as indication that the company in question had failed to go public. But that was then. Today Series Fs are not that rare. Indian B2B marketplace Moglix just raised one, which doubled its valuation to $2.6 billion. Tiger co-led the $250 million round.

And if you are looking down the barrel of a blizzard, TechCrunch’s Equity podcast has your downtime covered. Enjoy!

European, North American edtech startups see funding triple in 2021

Open laptop and book on a desk, edtech

Image Credits: Bet_Noire (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Pre-pandemic, VCs were notoriously reluctant to invest in education-related companies. Today, edtech startups are seeing higher average deal sizes, more seed and pre-seed funding from non-VC investors, and an influx of generalists.

According to Rhys Spence, head of research at Brighteye Ventures, funding for edtech startups based in Europe and North America trebled over the last year.

“Exciting companies are spawning across geographies and verticals, and even generalist investors are building conviction that the sector is capable of producing the same kind of outsized returns generated in fintech, healthtech and other sectors,” writes Spence.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

European, North American edtech startups see funding triple in 2021

Big Tech Inc.

  • Northern Light Venture Capital’s He Huang says the Chinese robotics market is overheated: Per the investor, robotics in China is “riddled with speculation and overvalued companies,” calling the situation a bubble. It’s worth noting that China’s central government is working to retool where its tech investment dollars flow.
  • Robinhood goes down, back up: This morning, in the wake of the company’s lackluster earnings report, TechCrunch dug through why Robinhood’s stock sold off in after-hours, pre-market, and early trading sessions yesterday and today. And then Robinhood turned around and gained ample ground during the rest of the day. It’s a weird market moment, but good news for the U.S. fintech all the same.
  • Google to allow legacy G Suite users to move to free accounts: After angering techies still using the “G Suite legacy free edition” by announcing that it was ending the program and requiring payment, the search giant has decided to ”offer more options to existing users,” TechCrunch reports. Somewhere inside of Google, a business decision just met the market and was flipped on its head. Makes you wonder who is calling the shots over there, and if they previously worked for McKinsey.

TechCrunch Experts

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Amazon expands its Sidewalk IoT network with an enterprise-grade bridge

Back in 2019, Amazon first announced its Sidewalk network, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol and network for connecting smart devices — and keeping them online when your own WiFi network, for example, goes down, by piggybacking on your neighbor’s network. Since last year, Amazon has been turning its Echo devices into Sidewalk bridges and select Ring and Tile devices can now access the network. Now, Amazon is launching its first professional-grade Sidewalk device meant to cover large areas like a university campus or park.

The full name for the new device is a mouthful: the Amazon Sidewalk Bridge Pro by Ring. It could be installed inside but is mostly meant to be set up outside — and ideally on a high spot — and can cover hundreds of devices up to five miles away (depending on the local circumstances, of course).

To test the devices, Amazon partnered with Arizona State University, which will install these new Sidewalk bridges on light poles on its Tempe campus. The University Technology Office plans to use it as a proof-of-concept with plans to connect sunlight and temperature sensors, CO2 detectors and particle counters.

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon is also partnering with Thingy, an IoT company that specializes in environmental monitoring, to install its air quality monitoring tools to alert first responders of potential wildfires.

“Amazon Sidewalk Bridge Pro brings us the power of [Long Range] in a massive number of needed locations, easy integration with our existing applications in AWS, and trusted security for the devices and applications. We are very excited to work with Amazon Sidewalk to measure air quality and wildfires with our sensors and help solve the connectivity challenges for these critical applications,” said Scott Waller, CEO and co-founder of Thingy.

But beyond the device itself, it’s the fact that Amazon continues to invest in the Sidewalk ecosystem that’s most important here.

“We’re building a network, we’re enabling actors to help the IoT industry,” Stefano Landi, the director of Amazon Sidewalk, told me. “At the end of the day, if we want to drive the proliferation of smart and connected devices everywhere, you need to have the right network. If you talk to IoT developers today, yes, there are many options, but either it’s very expensive, from a connectivity perspective vs. cellular, or the range is limited, or it’s draining the battery, or it’s just that the overall development cycle is too complex. So we felt that we should invest and that’s what we’ve done and we continue to invest in enabling these networks so that the IoT community can build any type of application: consumer, enterprise, public sector. ”

Landi noted that only a few months after launching the network, the company now has very strong residential coverage in more than 100 major U.S. metro areas. In part, of course, that’s because there are a lot of Echo devices in America’s homes and unless users opt out, most modern Echo smart speakers now have Sidewalk enabled by default. Not everybody is comfortable with that, though Amazon would argue that it designed its network to be privacy-first and that it won’t use a lot of bandwidth (it’s mostly for passing alerts, not your Ring camera’s video feed, after all). But it’s a fair guess that most users aren’t even aware of Sidewalk to begin with.

Covering a residential area is one thing, though. With the Sidewalk Bridge Pro, businesses can now also cover entire swaths of land to connect their sensors. There seems to be some demand for this, because Landi noted that “more than a few thousand companies” have already reached out to Amazon to ask about commercial use cases — mostly in connection with AWS IoT, the company’s cloud-based managed IoT service. A lot of this interest, Landis said, is coming from companies that want to build public sector solutions, mostly around smart city services.

“The Sidewalk Bridge Pro is a professional-grade bridge that is exactly tailored to be deployed outside of those [residential areas],” explained Landis. “So that now you have coverage pretty much everywhere. Think about commercial centers, parks, city parks, state parks, municipal parks, wildness areas, commercial area, and so on. Now you really bring that ubiquitous connectivity, so when you’re there, building a solution, you know that coverage is going to be pretty much anywhere that you need it.”

Landis noted that while he expects most users to install the bridge outdoors, it can also used indoors to cover a warehouse or a large store. And even though it’s explicitly called the ‘Pro,” we shouldn’t expect the company to launch a consumer-style “non-pro” version anytime soon. That’s what the Echo and Ring devices are for, after all.

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LiLz uses computer vision to read gauges and dials where humans prefer not to tread

No one wants to be the maintenance worker who has to hike through half a mile of damp hallways just to check the pressure gauge on a valve somewhere. LiLz makes it possible to keep an eye on such inconvenient physical interfaces remotely with a clever and practical application of machine learning.

The Japanese (specifically Okinawan) startup has been around for a little while — in fact our colleagues at TC JP have written them up. But despite the seemingly obvious value of its service, it hasn’t quite hit the big time yet. LiLz participated in CES as part of the country’s trade group, along with a bunch more companies listed here.

LiLz’s device looks a bit like a chubby tablet without a screen. It’s essentially a camera, light and processing and communications chips packed in with a big battery — enough power to last up to three years.

You mount the device so it can see the gauge or dial in question. After confirming picture and signal, you configure it in the app to interpret what it’s pointed at; it can read circular, semicircular and linear gauges, digital and rolling or analog digit displays, or things like colored warning lights. (The ML involved here is not trivial — I ran across this interesting article while looking into it.)

Once it’s set up, it’ll send readings live or at intervals to a central dashboard, or make them available via API so they can be queried or recorded elsewhere. The data goes out via LTE or Bluetooth.

Two Lilz cameras mounted near the ceiling of an industrial area.

Image Credits: LiLz

It’s a solution aimed directly at infrastructure and heavy industry, which often involve lots of legacy equipment located in hard-to-reach places: roofs, underground (but not too deep or the signal can’t penetrate), in labyrinthine factories and warehouses, etc.

Doing daily rounds of these dials is not just dull work for humans, but can be dangerous as well. Using a robot is another way to automate it, but doesn’t a network of IoT devices seem more practical than a quadrupedal bot trucking around constantly?

LiLz CTO Kuba Kolodziejczyk said that the company has been expanding quickly following its debut in 2020 and a $2.2 million Series A round in early 2021.

Screenshot of the Lilz interface showing readings from a dial being made by the software.

Image Credits: LiLz

“We grew from 240 cameras deployed at 34 locations by a few early users before June 2020, to 2000 cameras deployed at 320 locations for over 100 clients now, and expect to grow to 5000 cameras by end this year,” he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “We now have a few clients using more than hundred cameras at single location.”

They started by targeting basic building management, but now have expanded to chemical and industrial plants, construction and manufacturing sites, public infrastructure and more due to customer demand, he added.

And the capabilities of the device are increasing as well. They’ve mainly been iterating on the software, making it able to be updated remotely, improving accuracy and resilience to disturbance, and adding data sharing and other features. There’s a new explosion-proof (!) version of the hardware as well. Maybe they should get into making phone cases as a side gig.

New products are on the way, one for “sound search” and another for counting of objects in the camera’s view, but both are at a very early stage now. And new capabilities like monitoring float and level gauges, among other things.

Meanwhile, they’ve come to CES to make some outreach to potential clients outside Japan. The show is looking like something of a bust, but maybe a few techs and managers will read this and think “wow, that would be handy.” You can find out more at the shiny new English website here.

Read more about CES 2022 on TechCrunch

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Afero raises $50M Series C for its security-focused IoT platform

With the Samsara IPO heading toward pricing, it’s a good moment to spend a little more time digging into the IoT market. There’s a lot more going on than merely the liquidity point of one of its players, it turns out.

Afero, for example, closed a $50 million Series C today, led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. The new capital raise is roughly equivalent to all the capital that Afero raised prior to its latest round, per Crunchbase data, implying that the startup now has more cash on hand than at any point prior.

After being slightly surprised at how large Samsara’s own IoT-focused business had grown while we weren’t watching, TechCrunch got ahold of Afero CEO Joe Britt and Crosspoint’s Hugh Thompson to chat more about its business and why it chose this moment to raise.

What does Afero do?

Per Britt, when his team was putting Afero together, they noted projections indicating that the number of connected devices in the world was going to scale by an order of magnitude.

Given that anticipated boom in connected gadgets, sensors and the like, Afero’s IoT platform was built with security in mind. That might sound intuitive, but Britt argues that the web was not initially compiled with security as a top priority, which has led to round after round of issues surrounding breaches and hacks.

If we’re going to connect our lives and businesses to the internet on an ambient basis, security is going to be a pretty darn big deal. Else your toaster or production is going to get hacked.

Thompson, who has a background in security work, stressed how important that stance was to his interest in investing in the company, saying that the startup is “rare” in having “built things right [in security terms] from the very beginning.” (Thanks to TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker, I am more aware than ever of how frequently major companies are compromised, making me sympathetic to arguments of the importance of building with a security-first mindset.)

Afero’s IoT platform also includes a software development toolkit (SDK) for customer companies to build mobile apps on top of, as well as the ability to tailor itself to customer use cases.

In practice, the startup works with companies like Home Depot to bring connected devices to markets like the smart home segment. According to Britt and Thompson, the company’s platform can also support offline items like tagged physical goods to help track supply chains.

Why raise now?

Of all the startups that I have spoken to after raising a Series C, Afero is the smallest in terms of full-time staffing with just 24 people. Obviously, the company is going to do some hiring with its new capital. It also plans to invest in its go-to-market efforts — more spending on marketing, sales and so forth.

Asked by TechCrunch how large the company’s in-market footprint is today, Afero’s CEO declined to share a specific number, and after trying to find a way to explain general scale without being too precise, he simply said that there are “a lot” of Afero-connected devices in the world. Normally we’d complain a bit about a lack of hard numbers, but given that the startup’s customers might not want it to disclose how many of their devices sit atop Afero’s platform, it makes some sense.

In time, when Afero has a wider customer base, we’ll expect more specificity.

A few years back, we might have been skeptical of the scale of the market that Afero is tackling, but Samsara’s growth changed our general perspective.

The soon-to-be public company’s platform collects IoT data from real-world business operations, allowing for the creation of an application layer atop data sourced from sensors. Samsara’s revenues of $113.8 million last quarter provide proof of market demand for IoT platforms more generally.

Afero’s best-known partnership has more of a consumer flavor — Home Depot’s HubSpace line is geared toward the public — than what Samsara has built, so the two are not direct competitors today. We’re not trying to say that Afero is coming after Samsara or the other way around. At least not yet.

Looking ahead, we’ll be curious to see how many new customer companies Afero can land in the next few quarters — and how soon it will scale to the point that it’s comfortable sharing harder metrics.

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BeeHero’s precision pollination platform wings its way to $19M in new funding

Move over, precision agriculture — precision apiculture is what’s on the minds of all future-focused farmers. BeeHero has been growing fast since its debut and seed round last year, and $19M in new funding means it can scale beyond its initial markets and find more uses for its one-of-a-kind collection of data collected from thousands of active honeybee hives.

The company empowers hives with IoT tech, making it possible to track the movements and health of their bees practically in real time and catch things like mite infestations before they go too far. The result is huge improvements to crop yields, healthier hives, and less trips in the tractor. The ordinary method of placing hives and then driving out to check on them every few weeks is slow and inefficient; a hive may have collapsed during that time, or is pollinating ineffectively, condemning acres of fields to an unproductive season.

“The way pollination is handled today is challenging,” BeeHero CEO and co-founder Omer Davidi said. “There’s a shortage of hives; you get a box, you don’t know what’s inside, you just hope for the best. This is not an effective way to strategize your pollination. You need to understand the stressors, the variety of inputs and outputs… but to do this with older, less data intensive industries is hard.”

Beehives illustrated with labels describing problems they might be facing, like mites.

Image Credits: BeeHero

Despite the challenges of essentially launching during the initial panicked months of the pandemic, Davidi said that their traction was remarkable once they figured out how to make that connection with farmers, many of whom are slowly but surely adopting modern solutions. They’re skeptical of the benefits and understandably suspect startup founders offering quick solutions (via video calls and virtual demos, no less) of being charlatans.

“Originally I said, guys, we have to tell everyone we’ve increased sunflowers or cashews by a hundred percent! But you have to be careful. They’ve been doing this the same way for generations. When you come out of nowhere saying ‘I’ve figured it all out,’ you lose credibility immediately,” he explained. “So we had to under-promise and over-deliver, and it pushed us to build a lower touch onboarding process. Then once they see the results, they want to do it year after year.”

The work has paid off, however, and BeeHero is now working with several of the top almond growers in California, which dominates the production of that crop globally. By the end of the year it expects to manage 100,000 hives and be the biggest pollination provider in the U.S. (they’re currently the fourth largest).

The BeeHero app on a smartphone showing hive health metrics.

The BeeHero app on a smartphone showing hive health metrics.

The $15M A round comes from ADM Capital, Rabo Food and Agri Innovation Fund, iAngels, FirstTime, J-Ventures, UpWest, Entrée Capital, Good Company, the Arison Group, and Gaingels. The company has also won $4M in grants from the European Commission, the BIRD Foundation, and the Israel Innovation Authority.

The primary goal of the raise is to expand beyond the U.S. and almonds. The plan is to expand first to berries, avocados, and apples, then to crops like sunflower and soybeans. Even greenhouse crops like tomatoes might be possible. Australia and Europe are both on the list, but it depends on partnerships and other factors, though at least the money’s there.

Davidi is hoping that the growing bee activity database will prove an invaluable resource in other ways, though he was realistic about the stage they’re in.

“As a data scientist, I can tell you: we know nothing,” he admitted. But “we” means the industry in general, and BeeHero is building by far the largest collection of bee-adjacent data out there. Knowing how hives and pollination react to different weather patterns, crops and planting styles, pesticides, invasive species (they’re watching for murder hornets) and a dozen other factors would be tremendously valuable and the company’s work is only beginning.

“For instance, we’re only just learning this, but bees know about rainfall 30 minutes before it happens,” Davidi said. Why? How? They have guesses, but whatever the case, it could be a useful data point for farmers — and probably for apiculture generally.

Research partnerships with the World Bee Project and Japan’s Ministry of Culture, among others in the academic sphere and beyond, show that there is untapped potential in this trove of data. With pollination so important to maintaining the world’s food supply and bees subject to an increasing number of threats, we’ll take any insights we can get.