SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Particle announced it has secured $20 Million in Series B funding to bring its world-class IoT solutions to Enterprise companies. The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures and Particle’s previous investors.
Founded in 2012 by Zach Supalla, CEO and Zachary Crockett, CTO, Particle has become the most widely-used IoT platform, with more than 100,000 people and companies developing IoT products. As the market has matured, Particle’s focus has shifted to Enterprise IoT, delivering significant value through connectivity.
“While the media’s IoT focus has been primarily on consumer electronics, wearables, and ‘smart home’, we’ve learned from our customers that the future of IoT is within the enterprise market,” said Zach Supalla, CEO at Particle. “Our customers often deliver meaningful business value right out of the gate when they connect their physical assets and start collecting data.”
Particle’s “full-stack” IoT platform includes everything a company needs to connect their devices to the web, including Wi-Fi and cellular modules, IoT SIM cards and data plans, a secure and reliable IoT cloud, and SDKs for building mobile and web applications for IoT products. This full-stack approach makes it dramatically faster and easier to bring an IoT product to market.
As Enterprise IoT grows in tandem with cellular IoT, their applications require an always-on, reliable cellular connected network. According to Machina Research, “Cellular connections will grow from 334 million at the end of 2015 to 2.2 billion by 2025.”
Particle cellular connectivity has been deployed in a wide variety of industrial and municipal IoT applications, such as in gas stations, on oil rigs, in stormwater drains, and in manufacturing equipment. 50% of S&P 500 companies are using Particle to develop IoT solutions, including 90% of S&P IT companies and 59% of S&P Industrials.
"Zach and the team at Particle had a very smart insight early on—many enterprise IoT initiatives fail in the difficulty of execution: it's hard to get devices online reliably. We were really impressed with the company's decision to focus on a vertically integrated full-stack platform to get enterprise IoT products connected, while the rest of the industry focused on cloud-only platforms," said Andrew Parker, General Partner at Spark Capital. "Particle built a solution that takes a complex problem and solves it with an easy to use, consumer-like product execution. We couldn't be more excited to partner with this team as they continue to execute on their vision."
About Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in startups led by creative thinkers. We partner with entrepreneurs who make products and services for consumers as well as business people. We are proud supporters of companies such as Cruise Automation, Oculus, Postmates, Slack, Tumblr, Twitter, Warby Parker, Wayfair, and Wealthfront. We have offices in SoMA in San Francisco, Astor Place in New York City, and the Back Bay in Boston. Spark Capital was founded 12 years ago. We have $3B under management across early-stage and growth funds.
About Particle
Particle is a scalable, reliable and secure Internet of Things device platform that enables businesses to quickly and easily build, connect and manage their connected solutions. Particle aims to making the Internet of Things easy and accessible. Particle's tools are used by over 100,000 engineers in more than 170 countries, including Fortune 500 companies who are developing and managing fleets of new IoT products. Their portfolio includes Wi-Fi and Cellular connectivity modules, a cellular data platform, a device management console, and a comprehensive set of development tools. Particle was listed as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2015 and its CEO, Zach Supalla, has spoken as an authority on the Internet of Things at prominent events such as OSCON, Solid, Web Summit, GMIC, and Launch.
About Qualcomm Ventures
As the Venture Capital investment group of Qualcomm Incorporated, a world leader in next-generation wireless technologies, Qualcomm Ventures has been making strategic investments in technology companies that have the potential to dramatically transform our world since 2000. As a global investor we’re focused on building the connections that bring our mobile future forward. For more information please visit: www.qualcommventures.com.
