The Week in Review: IoT

Finance
Orbbec of Shenzhen, China, a developer of motion sensing technology, raised more than $200 million in Series D funding led by Ant Financial. Also participating in the new round were SAIF Financial, Green Pine Capital Partners, R-Z Capital, and Tianlangxing Capital Partners. Established in 2013, Orbbec develops 3D sensors for applications in facial recognition, gesture recognition, robotics, smart homes, and 3D map reconstruction.

Nanit received $14 million in Series B funding, bringing its total private funding to almost $30 million. Jerusalem Venture Partners, a new investor, led the latest round, and was joined by existing investors Upfront Ventures, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and Vaal Investment Partners. With offices in Israel and the U.S., Nanit uses computer vision and machine learning technology to monitor the sleep of babies.

Paris-based eLichens raised €7 million (about $8.2 million) from new and existing investors, increasing its total private funding to more than €11 million (around $13 million). Founded in 2014, eLichens provides air quality sensors for uses in automotive vehicles, gas leak monitoring, HVAC/DCV, industrial safety, smart cities, and smart homes.

ATX Seed Ventures, ZX Ventures, Mick Mountz, and Yechiam Yemini provided $2.2 million in seed funding to Pensa Systems of Austin, Texas, which develops autonomous perception systems for inventory visibility. Pensa is addressing the retail consumer goods industry, working with manufacturers and retailers.

M&A
The Building Technologies Division of Siemens agreed to acquire Enlighted, a provider of IoT systems for buildings; financial terms weren’t revealed. The transaction is scheduled to close in the third quarter. Enlighted will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens Industry.

Marvell Technology Group reports that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States completed its review of Marvell’s proposed acquisition of Cavium, without finding any unresolved national security concerns. The deal still awaits other regulatory clearances, including that of the State Administration for Market Regulation in China.

Cybersecurity
The Cisco Talos group reports that malware it calls “VPNFilter” has infected at least 500,000 networking devices in some 54 countries, taking in small office/home office routers (not those made by Cisco) and network-attached storage devices. The malware is apparently targeting supervisory control and data acquisition systems using Modbus protocols.

Products/Services
Sprint is working with myDevices and The Goldie Group to provide IoT products and services through the Sprint IoT Factory, which the wireless carrier says can deliver solutions in two days. The online marketplace has more than 550,000 developers offering ready-made boxed solutions, it was said.

Verizon Wireless certified the Sequans Communications Monarch system-in-package for use on its network. The Monarch SiP pairs the company’s Monarch LTE baseband platform with a radio-frequency front-end module from Skyworks Solutions.

Lattice Semiconductor debuted Lattice sensAI, a technology stack meant to accelerate integration of machine learning inferences into IoT applications. The stack brings together custom design services, modular hardware kits, neural network IP cores, reference designs, and software tools.

ADLINK Technology brought out DXS, its IoT digital-experiments-as-a-service offering. DXS is said to provide client asset connection, data management consolidation, endpoint management, enterprise sharing, and pre-validated hardware, along with field and professional services.