The Week in Review: IoT

Finance
BroadLink has raised $54.4 million in Series D funding from Citic Private Equity Funds Management. Baidu and Libai Group participated in the new round. BroadLink will use the money to expand its artificial intelligence and Internet of Things units, while also acquiring or investing in companies involved in smart home devices.

Aperio Systems of Haifa, Israel, has received $4.5 million in seed funding led by Energias de Portugal. Data Point Capital, Jump Capital, and Scopus Ventures participated in the round. Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, Liran Tancman, and Shlomi Boutnaru also invested in Aperio, which offers its Data Forgery Protection technology for fighting internal and external cybersecurity threats against critical infrastructure. The startup will use the funds for expanding worldwide operations and the launching of its intrusion prevention system for supervisory control and data acquisition systems.

Xperiel has taken in $7 million in Series A funding from Intuit co-founder Scott Cook, Cyan Banister of Founders Fund, Western Technology Investment, and the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association. The firm’s Real World Web platform helps users integrate augmented reality, virtual reality, and IoT devices into their brick-and-mortar infrastructure for customer engagement. The Sacramento Kings are customers for the Xperiel technology.

M&A
AVX completed its acquisition of Ethertronics for $142 million in cash and assuming $8 million in net debt. Ethertronics makes active and passive antenna systems for wireless applications in the Internet of Things and other uses, employing its Isolated Magnetic Dipole technology.

Mavenir has purchased Argyle Data, a provider of big data analytics using machine learning to recognize abnormalities in network traffic; financial terms were not revealed. Argyle’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology could detect zero-day vulnerabilities on mobile networks, to which many IoT devices are attached.

Products/Services
Mozilla’s Project Things has come up with a way for Internet users to develop their own Things Gateway with a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

Intel this week unveiled the Intel Xeon D-2100 processor, a system-on-a-chip device, for edge computing and for applications in data centers and networks that are constrained by power and space. Enterprise networks can use the chip line for embedded mid-range IoT devices, among other applications.

Infineon Technologies introduced OPTIGA Trust X, a hardware-based security offering for IoT devices. It offers secured communication and software updates, mutual authentication, and other cybersecurity features for drones, industrial robots, refrigerators, washing machines, and smart home systems, among multiple applications.

Connectivity
Verizon Communications reports completing its first narrowband IoT data session and will use the cellular specification across its LTE network during this year, joining T-Mobile in offering commercial NB-IoT services. Verizon used Ericsson software to test the technology in the 189 kilohertz frequency band, which won’t interfere with other cellular traffic.

Market Research
BI Intelligence has a new report on IoT technology, forecasting there will be more than 55 billion IoT devices by 2025, compared with about 9 billion devices last year. The aggregate IoT investment between 2017 and 2025 will be almost $15 trillion, the report predicts. The Internet of Things 2018 report can be purchased here for $495.