DevicePilot today announced the successful completion of its Angel fund-raising round, securing $900k of fresh capital that allows the company to focus on delivering its DevicePilot service for Internet of Things (IoT) device management. DevicePilot was founded in 2013 and continuously monitors and manages connected products over their complete life-cycle as more IoT projects move from pilot stage to deployment at scale, with thousands or millions of devices.
The list of investors in this round include Skyscanner‘s founders Gareth Williams and Bonamy Grimes as well as Telefonica’s corporate accelerator Wayra Unlimited.
DevicePilot has come a long way in the past two years. From day one, DevicePilot delivered IoT technology but refocused after a while. DevicePilot CEO Pilgrim Beart explains: “For example, our HyperWeave universal IoT gateway for ARM and our leading role in the development of the IoT Hypercat standard. But as we engaged with more and more connected-product companies across many different verticals it became clear to us that they all suffer from the same problem as they scale – managing their devices.”
DevicePilot is now busy building a universal answer to this critical barrier to IoT expansion. Currently in alpha stage with a range of customers both big and small, the DevicePilot service gives connected-product companies at trial stage or beyond, three ways to manage their growing device estate:
1) Asset Management – what devices have been deployed in the field, who has them, where are they and what software are they running, etc.?
2) Monitoring – how many devices are actually working right now and if not, DevicePilot uses a triage process to discover why.
3) Lifecycle Management – pro-actively configures and updates devices throughout their lifecycle from deployment to end-of-life.
In regards to the current funding round, Chairman Rob Dobson stated: “We ended-up being significantly over-subscribed for this round, which is testament to the strength of the team, the product focus and the exciting growth of the IoT market,”
CEO Beart and Chairman Dobson have each previously achieved $100m exits from new tech businesses and have a wealth of experience in scaling-up connected devices.