The Week in Review: IoT

Finance
CyberInt raised $18 million in new funding led by Viola Growth and including existing investors. The company provides cybersecurity detection and response services. CyberInt has offices in Israel, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Panama.

San Diego-based Kneron, which provides artificial intelligence technology for edge devices, received $18 million in Series A1 funding led by Horizons Ventures. The startup raised more than $10 million in Series A funding last year, a round led by Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund and CDIB Capital Group. Kneron also counts Himax Technologies, Qualcomm, and Sequoia Capital among its investors.

Stellaps Technologies of Bengaluru, India, raised $14 million in Series B funding led by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and IndusAge Partners. Also participating were Qualcomm Ventures, ABB Technology Ventures, Omnivore Partners, Blume Ventures, BEENEXT, and Venture Highway. Stellaps offers an Internet of Things platform for dairy farming with its SmartMoo Cloud.

Calgary, Alberta-based SensorUp received C$2 million (about $1.54 million) in seed funding led by Vanedge Capital. The startup provides geolocation technology for the IoT. SensorUp counts Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Natural Resources Canada among its worldwide customers.

ForwardX Robotics, developer of autonomous luggage that follows travelers, raised $10 million in funding led by CDH Fund, with involvement by Eastern Bell Venture Capital. Its Ovis smart luggage will be available later this year. ForwardX is based in Beijing, China, with an office in San Jose, Calif.

Products/Services
At the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan, Microsoft this week introduced Windows 10 IoT Core Services, which includes Device Health Attestation, detecting whether client devices have secure BIOS and boot software configurations enabled. The new paid services complement Windows 10 IoT Core, which debuted in 2015. Core IoT Services also features the Device Update Center, which enables users to control, create, and customize updates for operating systems, drivers, and OEM-specific files.

IoT technology is being employed to protect black rhinos in South Africa. IBM is working with Wageningen University in the Netherlands to keep track of various herd animals in the Welgevonden Game Reserve. Monitoring the movement of gazelles, impalas, zebras, and other animals can help tell if those animals are being approached by natural predators, poachers, or tourists. The effort uses a 3G wireless network and feeds data from collars on the animals to the IBM Watson IoT platform.

NXP Semiconductors is working with Mastercard and Visa to introduce a white-label wallet service, mWallet 2GO, developed on the NXP Secure Service 2GO Platform. Montblanc has implemented mWallet 2GO for its own mobile wallet. Meanwhile, NXP is partnering with Baidu Cloud in China to secure IoT devices, utilizing Baidu’s Tiangong IoT platform.

Cybersecurity
The VPNFilter malware infecting routers and other Internet-connected devices has infected more than the 500,000 devices initially estimated, and it is adding malicious capabilities to each infected device, according to Cisco Talos.

Market Research
ON World forecasts shipments of wireless sensor network chipsets will rise from 1 billion units in 2018 to 3.4 billion units in 2023. The growth will be driven by wireless mesh sensor networks, location-aware personal area networks, and low-power wide-area networks, according to the market research firm.