SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mason, the world’s first provider of mobile infrastructure for smart hardware products, announced today a $25M Series A led by premier technology investing firm Coatue Management, with GGV Capital and Base10 also joining as new investors. Mason welcomes Thomas Laffont and Arielle Zuckerberg from Coatue to the board. The funding will accelerate Mason’s platform innovation and hiring growth to serve more enterprise customers in new markets.
“Building integrated hardware and software solutions is incredibly complex - which is why Coatue is thrilled to invest in Jim and the Mason team. Mason lets software companies get back to focusing on their core competencies by giving them the critical tools needed to launch dedicated smart hardware initiatives in a matter of months,” said Arielle Zuckerberg, Partner at Coatue Ventures. “Businesses can save the time and cost of building, deploying and managing dedicated hardware while reaping the benefits of capturing data and addressing customer pain points in unprecedented ways.”
Mason’s customer use cases include patient engagement solutions in hospitals, electronic data capture for clinical trials, electronic logging for trucking, ordering kiosks at restaurants, dedicated gateways for medical devices, and more. Regardless of the use case, all Mason customers share the common need to deliver their software on dedicated hardware to help end-users collect and interact with critical data.
Mason’s founder and CEO, Jim Xiao, sees this as perfect timing given growing demand: “We’re honored to have the backing of this amazing group of investors. It’s a powerful endorsement of the market need and our mission to help anyone build and deliver smart hardware products in as little as two days. We’ve seen the incredible impact dedicated devices can have across every major industry, but there have always been major roadblocks going to market. Our goal is to remove those barriers and make delivering game-changing software on dedicated hardware easy and affordable.”
Part of what makes Mason’s solution unique is its software innovation combined with the speed and efficiency of a global supply chain. “Mason is building a strong platform that harnesses hardware innovation with a layer of enterprise-grade stability, control, and security. This unlocks the power of hardware-enabled software and services for everyone, from enterprise CIOs to product owners to individual developers,” said Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital. “We have a long track record of backing innovation across the enterprise and we’re betting on Mason to be as transformative to smart product innovation as cloud infrastructure was to software development.”
The funding will fuel continued hiring growth, expansion of the Mason hardware portfolio, and strategic initiatives to expedite bringing smart hardware to market. In the next six months, Mason plans to give customers the ability to build, test, and deploy completely new or revamped product lines in under two weeks. The company’s goal is to streamline anything that slows down the process of bringing products to market, whether it’s upfront costs, manufacturing, delivery, testing, or even the app development processes.
“We are excited to be investing in Jim and the Mason team as they scale out their transformative platform,” said TJ Nahigian, Managing Partner at Base10. “Mason is unlocking a rapidly growing number of real economy use cases for smart devices that previously were not addressable with existing solutions.”
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About Mason
Mason provides mobile infrastructure—including hardware, software, and services—to help companies build and scale smart hardware products. Our turn-key solution provides end-to-end control over everything from the hardware and operating system to device management and data plans, so our customers can spend more time building great products, and less time worrying about their underlying mobile infrastructure. Connect via Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
About GGV Capital
GGV Capital is a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, and Singapore. Learn more at ggvc.com.
About Base10
Base10 is an early stage venture firm investing in Automation for the Real Economy. Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, the firm focuses on automation impacting many sectors of the Real Economy including transportation, hardware manufacturing, logistics, and construction. Notable portfolio investments include ThePillClub, Shipwell, Reflektive, and Wonolo. Headquartered in San Francisco, Base10 currently has $137M in assets under management. Connect via https://base10.vc/ and @Base10Partners.
