San Francisco-based Particle, which develops what it claims is one of the world’s most popular internet of things (IoT) platforms, today announced that it’s raised $40 million in a series C funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners. The tranche, which saw participation from Root Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, Spark Capital, Green D Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and SOSV and which follows on the heels of a $20 million series B round in July 2017, brings the company’s total capital haul to over $81.3 million.
The capital infusion comes after a year in which revenue grew 150% year-over-year, according to CEO Zach Supalla, driven mostly by a growing customer base that now counts Jacuzzi, Continental Tires, Watsco, Shifted Energy, SpaceX, Keurig, Altrac, Stanford, MIT, NASA, Opti, and over 8.500 others among its ranks. He says that Particle’s cloud-hosted platform now ingests more than 22 billion sensor data points in total a year.
“Over the last seven years we’ve seen a wide range of business embrace IoT, especially those driving innovation in traditional industries,” said Supalla. “More and more of our customers are in old-fashioned, even unglamorous, businesses like stormwater management, industrial equipment, shipping, or monitoring any number of compressors, pumps, and valves. These businesses are diverse, but the common thread is that they need to monitor and control mission-critical machines, and we see it as our mission to help bring their machines, vehicles, and devices into the 21st century.”
Particle’s eponymous solutions suite spans software and hardware in addition to several connectivity products. It provides development kits with Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and mesh capabilities, along with SDKs for iOS, Android, and web apps. The kits connect to a network optimized for IoT, the backend of which handles over-the-air updates, SIM, and device management. And they run Device OS, Particle’s lightweight operating system for embedded devices, which manages low-level hardware interactions while encrypting sent messages.
Particle offers LTE and 2G/3G coverage in over 150 countries leveraging a patchwork of carriers, enabling developers to manage devices from a dashboard — Device Cloud — from which they can deploy code or issue updates. This complements the company’s low-power, self-healing Particle Mesh mesh networking solution, which is built on the OpenThread standard and plays nicely with Adafruit’s Feather form factor.
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