DevicePilot has raised nearly three-quarters of a million pounds in angel investment to work on its IoT device management service.
The firm, originally called 1248, gained support from investors including Skyscanner‘s founders Gareth Williams and Bonamy Grimes as well as Telefonica’s corporate accelerator Wayra Unlimited and serial entrepreneurs Joe and Wendy White.
“Since starting the company we’ve delivered IoT technology with some great partners,” said DevicePilot CEO Pilgrim Beart. “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.”
The firm is now engaged in building a universal answer to this critical barrier to IoT expansion and is in alpha stage with a range of customers, both big and small, to help them to manage their growing device estate.
DevicePilot Asset Management provides information on what devices have been deployed in the field, who has them, where are they and what software are they running, for example. It will also monitor how many devices are actually working and use a triage process to discover any problems, while the Lifecycle Management functionality pro-actively configures and updates devices from deployment to end-of-life.
The investment comes as a survey by the firm of 50 different companies deploying IoT products. The results showed that device management was a major barrier to scaling IoT projects.
DevicePilot tackles the data management challenge
“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,” said Chairman Rob Dobson. 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.
Ian Hughes, IoT analyst at 451 Research, told Internet of Business that for IT companies, managing device rollout may be an unfamiliar territory. “Version and asset management of a large number of devices can be a challenge at the enterprise scale,” he said.
“For product companies seeking to make their devices IoT-enabled, the processes of communicating with their products directly, collecting and understanding the data will need new tools and skills.”