The Week in Review: IoT

Finance
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Armis raised $30 million in Series B funding, bringing total funding for the provider of enterprise Internet of Things security to $47 million. Red Dot Capital Partners of Israel led the round, joined by Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital also participated in the latest funding, which Armis will use to expand sales and marketing and to continue development of its device knowledge base and security platform.

Expel of Herndon, Va., received $20 million in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Battery Ventures, Greycroft, Lightbank, NEA, Paladin Capital Group, and Profile Capital Management joined in investing in the managed security startup. Expel has total private funding of $27.5 million. It will use the new money to accelerate product development and go-to-market activities.

OPAQ Networks, also based in Herndon, raised $22.5 million in Series B funding for its network security cloud offering, bringing its total funding to $43.5 million. Greenspring Associates, a new investor, led the round and was joined by existing investors Columbia Capital and Harmony Partners. OPAQ will use the new funds to accelerate growth and to support go-to-market initiatives. The security-as-a-service startup last month acquired FourV Systems, which supplies the GreySpark business intelligence offering for managing security operations. GreySpark will be integrated into the OPAQ Cloud platform.

Vertex Ventures and Insight Venture Partners co-led $15.5 million in new funding for OwnBackup, which provides data backup and recovery services from offices in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Other investors in OwnBackup are Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Verkada, which offers enterprise IoT video security, received $15 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $18.9 million. Next47, the Siemens venture fund, led the round, joined by First Round Capital (an existing investor) and Hans Robertson. Verkada will use the new money to scale up its manufacturing, expand its sales team, and continue development of enterprise applications including computer vision and machine learning.

Waltham, Mass.-based Carbon Black this week filed for a $100 million initial public offering. The endpoint security software supplier plans to trade on Nasdaq under the CBLK ticker. The company had a net loss of $56 million on revenue of $162 million last year, compared with a net loss of $44.55 million on revenue of $116.24 million in 2016. Carbon Black has raised more than $230 million in private funding. Accomplice (formerly part of Atlas Venture) owns 17% of the company. Highland Capital Partners has an equity stake of 14.9%, Sequoia Capital owns 9.9%, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers holds 8.8%, and .406 Ventures 7.7%.

M&A
Palo Alto Networks agreed to acquire Secdo, which offers endpoint detection and response capabilities in cybersecurity. Financial terms of the deal weren’t revealed; the Calcalist website estimates the proposed transaction, which is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ fiscal third quarter, is valued at about $100 million. Israel-based Secdo had raised some $10 million in venture funding from Rafael Development and other investors.

Nike bought Invertex, a computer vision startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Financial terms weren’t revealed. The activewear company will use Invertex’s technology to increase its capabilities in artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Cybersecurity
The U.S. doesn’t have a national cybersecurity doctrine, more than a year after President Donald Trump took office. Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer of Carbon Black, is concerned that Russia will retaliate with cyberattacks in response to the Trump administration’s most recent sanctions.

Products/Services
Qualcomm introduced the QCS603 and QCS605 system-on-a-chip devices for IoT applications, such as smart security cameras, smart displays, robotics, sports cameras, wearable cameras, and virtual reality. Both SoCs pair a multicore Arm processor with an artificial intelligence engine and an image signal processor.

Mocana rolled out the Mocana TrustCenter services platform for managing security in IoT devices and industrial control systems. The new offering is meant for manufacturers and operators of IoT devices and industrial equipment; it complements the company’s TrustPoint IoT endpoint security software.

Comcast has relaunched the Stringify application, which it acquired last year, for use in smart home management, supporting new hardware devices. The app is integrated with Comcast’s X1 cable television platform and the xFi home Wi-Fi offering.

August Home and SimpliSafe collaborated to integrate August Smart Locks with SimpliSafe security systems. The products can be remotely operated with SimpliSafe’s smartphone application, if users subscribe to the company’s Interactive Professional Alarm Monitoring Plan, which is $25 a month.

ClearBlade and nanotron Technologies are partnering to add ClearBlade’s IoT and edge computing platform to nanotron’s advanced tracking software. Nanotron will be able to offer location data analytics capabilities through the combination. Nanotron is a subsidiary of Sensera.

Telit Communications reports its LE866A1-NA LTE Category 1 and ME866A1-NA LTE-M modules are certified to operate on AT&T’s nationwide LTE network for data-only applications.

Siemens Healthineers is using SAS Institute’s IoT and machine learning capabilities to analyze data from its medical equipment installed around the world, such as magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography systems. SAS says it is also helping Lockheed Martin, Octo Telematics, and Western Digital for IoT analytics of data from their connected devices.

Cloudflare Spectrum was unveiled by Cloudflare to protect and accelerate email services, gaming servers, IoT devices, and any Internet-connected product from distributed denial-of-service attacks. Spectrum, now available to enterprise customers, is said to work with any Internet protocol. Cloudflare is expanding its security portfolio beyond World Wide Web applications, application programming interfaces, and websites with the Spectrum launch.