Golioth announces $2.5 million in Pre-Seed funding and developer beta
Today, we’re excited to announce our $2.5 million Pre-Seed funding led by Zetta Venture Partners, with participation from additional investors including Chris Aniszczyk (CTO of CNCF), Sam Ramji (CSO of Datastax), Shiva Rajaraman (VP Commerce at Facebook and former CTO WeWork), and Stephen Blum (CTO of PubNub). We’re also opening up Golioth to beta testers and are proud to share that we’ve joined the Zephyr™ Project as a Silver Member.
How do you bring 30.9B devices online?
Every physical product will eventually be internet connected. Adoption of both consumer and industrial IoT has been accelerating and is anticipated to grow exponentially over the next 10 years with 30.9B devices expected to come online by 2030. The teams building these devices are experts in the fields of electronics, manufacturing, industrial design, and user behavior, yet 90% of leaders at top companies building connected devices all face a similar challenge – how do they build the “I” for their “T”? Most of these companies struggle to adopt IoT because the prospect of implementing is too technical/complex and they lack the internal cloud and software teams or resources.
The mismatch between hardware & cloud
If you look at the IoT platforms that exist today, they are built primarily by the behemoth software companies who deeply understand cloud computing, databases, and networking and provide general purpose IoT offerings as a tiny product line built to serve the needs of other “cloud people”. This is in sharp contrast to the needs of hardware companies and “hardware people”. The experience and capabilities of the products they deliver in the physical world, not the cloud, drive their technology choices. It is the hardware teams that own the product and are instrumental in bringing it to market. For them, picking which touchscreen has the right color contrast or which radio has the best battery life matters when making a decision, and for these teams, the role of the cloud is just another product feature, and arguably not the most important. Cloud companies consider general purpose offerings advantageous because they’re familiar with those common tools, allowing them to build their apps and services faster. However, leveraging these general purpose cloud features of today’s IoT platforms is both not valuable to hardware people and actually introduces a ton of additional complexity since they simply don’t have that kind of familiarity.
The crux of the issue is that current IoT platforms were not built for hardware people, the key stakeholders in creating physical products. If a platform were to exist that was purpose-built for hardware teams it could gain significant adoption as it is better serving the needs of the user. One of the devs we spoke to called it the, “impedance mismatch between hardware and cloud engineering teams,” and we think that’s the best, geekiest way to describe it.
Empowering hardware teams
Our team members have spent our entire careers building hardware, networking infrastructure, web services, and apps. We have a combined 25 years working in IoT and even with that depth of experience, we’ve spent the last year talking to developers to truly understand what they need from an IoT platform. We heard 3 main themes:
⛅ Simplify the cloud
🛠️ Services built for hardware
✨ Choice (hardware, connectivity, protocols)
We’ll be sharing how we empower hardware developers in future posts but in summary:
Golioth provides turnkey IoT cloud services with unmatched levels of choice in what matters most to hardware developers: flexibility in hardware, embedded software, messaging protocols, and connectivity. Golioth supports a range of open IoT protocols and connectivity for communication, providing security by default.
Help shape the cloud built for you
We’ve been working hard to make Golioth the best solution for creating any IoT device. Over the last 3 months, we’ve received exceptionally positive feedback from our earliest testers so we’re thrilled to open up the platform to more users. Sign up for our beta here if you’d like to get your device from prototype to production in a fraction of the time and without the need for an entire cloud engineering team! If you want to hear more and see a demo we’ll be presenting at the first ever Zephyr™ Developer Summit on June 8-10.
And if any of this sounds interesting to you, we’re actively hiring – see our careers page for current openings.
~Jonathan Beri, CEO
