The Week In Review: IoT

Conferences
It’s been an action-packed week at Internet of Things World. The show was co-located at the Santa Clara Convention Center with the Connected & Autonomous Vehicles conference. There were lots of deals announced and many products or services debuted at IoT World, which has grown enormously in four years, from 700 attendees at its first event in Palo Alto, Calif., in 2014 to some 14,000 registered attendees going into this week’s conference. The exhibit floor was even more sprawling than last year in Santa Clara, with 100 firms set up within the Startup City area. Cybersecurity firms were in abundance this week, exhibiting and presenting. Rambus unveiled its turnkey IoT Device Management service within the CryptoManager platform, demonstrating the service in conjunction with STMicroelectronics. #IoTW17 touted itself as “the World’s Largest IoT Event,” and it certainly fit the bill. Internet of Things World Europe will take place June 13-15 in London, England.

Parks Associates next week will host its CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference on May 23-25 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport hotel in Burlingame, Calif. ADT, Honeywell, Nest Labs, Nortek, and Verizon Communications are among the companies participating in the conference. Parks forecasts almost 38 million U.S. households will have a smart home controller by 2021, providing more than $1.2 billion in annual recurring service revenue.

Finance
San Francisco-based IoT security platform startup Mocana reported raising another $11 million in private funding, bringing its funding total to $93.6 million. Sway Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Trident Capital Fund, and GE Ventures participated in the new venture round. Mocana will use the money for continued development of its technology for defending Industrial IoT devices. Grand View Research forecasts the IIoT market will be worth $933.62 billion by 2025.

TPG Growth led a new funding round for Brava Home, a startup in Redwood City, Calif., working in stealth mode on IoT hardware and software for the home. True Ventures last year led a Series A funding round of $12 million for Brava. The amount of this year’s funding wasn’t revealed. Participating in the new funding were DGNL Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, and The Rise Fund, among others.

AKUA received $3 million in seed-stage financing, led by Crosslink Capital, with participation by Talis Capital and Enterprise Security Syndicate. AKUA provides an IoT gateway platform, offering data-as-a-service, for the worldwide supply chain.

Iotas of Portland, Ore., got $2.25 million from Oregon Angel Fund and Rogue Venture Partners to continue work on its smart home platform for apartment renters. The startup has received a total of $5.3 million in funding, including $1.8 million in government grant funds.

Products/Services
Rambus will work with SoftBank’s Cybertrust Japan subsidiary, combining the Rambus CryptoManager Infrastructure with the Japanese company’s public key infrastructure (PKI) offerings, enabling secure communication from IoT device to the cloud and for over-the-air software updates.

NXP Semiconductors said its Android Things platform supports the Google Cloud IoT Core, the new managed service from Google Cloud. Cloud IoT Core features such Google services as BigQuery, Bigtable, Dataflow, DataStudio, and PubSub. The chip company’s platform includes an i.MX application processor and is meant to enable rapid development of Android-based IoT devices. NXP also said it will add support for Chromecast and Google Assistant built-in on its Android Things platform.

Microchip Technology now has a fully-certified Wi-Fi Software Development Kit with support for Apple HomeKit. The SDK pairs the cryptography hardware suites within Microchip’s CEC1702 microcontroller, based on ARM’s Cortex-M4, with the low-power WINC1015 8002.11b/g/n Wi-Fi module. The Wi-Fi SDK is said to establish pair setup in less than 1 second and pair verify in less than 0.1 second.

Market Research
MarketsandMarkets.com has a new report on the IoT device management market, which estimates the sector will increase from $693.4 million this year to about $2.56 billion by 2022, for a compound annual growth rate of 29.8%. Details here.