The Week In Review: IoT

Finance
Samsara, an Industrial Internet of Things startup, raised $40 million in its Series C financing, led by General Catalyst. Andreesen Horowitz, an existing investor, and Samsara’s founders also participated in the funding round, which values the company at $530 million. The supplier of Internet-connected sensors for industrial and transportation applications has raised a total of $80 million in private funding.

Another IIoT startup, Augury, received $17 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse Ventures and Munich Re/HSB Ventures. First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and Sound Ventures also participated in the latest financing. Augury, with offices in New York and Haifa, Israel, specializes in mechanical diagnostics.

Petasense came out of stealth mode this week with $1.8 million in seed-stage funding from True Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and angel investors. It’s yet another IIoT startup, with a focus on predictive maintenance.

Analysis
Joseph Costello, the first CEO of Cadence Design Systems and now the chairman and CEO of Enlighted, a smart-building IoT startup, gave a keynote address at the annual Design Automation Conference in Austin, Texas. “I believe that the IoT will be bigger than anything we have ever seen before,” he said. “The Internet caused a degree of consolidation of the industry into a few devices and this led to a decreasing number of successful companies producing them. The IoT will be the opposite. Things will become diversified and each will require different technologies, different sensors. We will see proliferation of design.”

Products
NXP Semiconductors this week uncorked its LPC84x line of microcontrollers, based upon ARM’s Cortex-M0+ design cores. The LPC845 MCU in particular integrates a flexible, capacitive touch sensing feature, with the capability to offer up to nine capacitive buttons. Evaluation kits and software packages will be available during the third quarter, NXP said. The chip company also introduced the NXP Touch offering, pairing specialized touch software with the Touch Sense Interface module of the Kinetis KE15Z MCU, with tools for designers of user interfaces. NXP Touch aims at IoT applications in home appliances, machines for industrial control, and smart buildings.

Samsung Electronics introduced the Exynos i T200 processor for IoT devices. The multiple-core chip is fabricated with a 28-nanometer high-k metal gate process.

Intel has quietly discontinued its Edison, Galileo, and Joule development boards for the IoT, saying shipments will stop at the end of this year, according to multiple online reports, such as this one. The chip giant remains in the IoT market with other offerings.

Conferences
The Internet of Things was a popular topic at this week’s 2017FLEX conference in Monterey, Calif. Francis Gouillart of the Experience Co-Creation Partnership described the “Internet of Tomatoes” project in New England, bringing IoT technology to the cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and retailing of tomatoes. Gartner analyst Dean Freeman described the IoT market as “the Internet of Many Things,” which will result in more than 20 billion live IoT endpoints by 2020. IoT “could propel printed electronics,” he said. “Materials is a huge market. Sensors are emerging as a huge market,” Freeman added.

Market Research
Visiongain forecasts the worldwide IoT health care market will see a compound annual growth rate of 23.3% over the next decade, increasing from $10.6 billion last year. Details on its report are available here.

ReportsnReports.com predicts the IoT security market will increase from $6.62 billion this year to $29.02 billion by 2022, for a CAGR of 34.4% over five years. Its report can be found here.

Bsquare’s DataV IoT platform was named in a Gartner report, “Competitive Landscape of IoT Platform Vendors,” published last month. Nine other vendors were profiled in the report.

Organizations
The LoRa Alliance said it now has more 500 ecosystem members. The LoRaWAN protocol is being used by at least 42 network operators, and there are more than 250 ongoing trials and city deployments, it was said.

The Internet of Things Community said Amazon Web Services has become a corporate member of the group. AWS served as a Platinum Partner for the IoT Community’s first IoT Slam Live, an event held this week in Raleigh, N.C.