The funding will allow the company to focus on delivering its DevicePilot service for IoT device management, which continuously monitors and manages thousands or millions of connected products over their complete life-cycle as IoT projects move from pilot stage to deployment at scale.
DevicePilot (originally called 1248) has come a long way in the past two years. “Since starting the company we’ve delivered IoT technology with some great partners such as ARM and played a leading role in the development of new IoT standards,” said DevicePilot CEO Pilgrim Beart. “But as we engaged with more and more connected-product companies across many different verticals it became clear to us that they all suffer from the same problem as they scale – managing their devices.”
DevicePilot is now busy building a universal answer to this critical barrier to IoT expansion and is in alpha stage with a range of customers, both big and small, to help them to manage their growing device estate. DevicePilot Asset Management provides information on what devices have been deployed in the field, who has them, where are they and what software are they running, for example. It will also monitor how many devices are actually working and use a triage process to discover any problems, while the Lifecycle Management functionality pro-actively configures and updates devices from deployment to end-of-life.
DevicePilot recently surveyed 50 companies deploying IoT products, which provided evidence that device management is a major barrier to scaling IoT projects. See http://www.devicepilot.com/news/white-papers/device-management-survey-reveals-risk-to-business-growth.html.
“We ended-up being significantly over-subscribed for this round, which is testament to the strength of the team, the product focus and the exciting growth of the IoT market,” said Chairman Rob Dobson. CEO Beart and Chairman Dobson have each previously achieved $100m exits from new tech businesses and have a wealth of experience in scaling-up connected devices.
Angel shareholders in this round include: Skyscanner founders Gareth Williams & Bonamy Grimes, serial telco entrepreneur Michael Berman, serial entrepreneurs Joe and Wendy White and Telefonica’s corporate accelerator Wayra Unlimited
DevicePilot also boasts an impressive Advisory Board, including the inventor of the webcam Quentin Stafford-Fraser; the founder of the world’s first IoT platform Usman Haque; Telefonica’s IoT MD David Taylor and senior personnel at ARM plc.
The University of Cambridge owns a 1% “Gift Share” in recognition of Pilgrim Beart’s time as a Visiting Fellow at the University’s Computer Lab.
