UK-based Foundries.io raises $8M to develop, deploy, maintain your IoT & Edge devices; here’s how

London-based Foundries.io, a cloud development and deployment solutions for secure IoT and Edge devices, has announced that it has raised $8M (approx €6.7M) in its Series A round of funding. The round was led by IQ Capital, with participation from Crane Venture Partners and Backed VC.

The raised capital from this round will support Foundries.io’s expansion plans through both talent recruitment and marketing, to bring its platform to further innovative companies around the world.

A software platform that reinvents IoT

Founded in 2017 by Ian Drew and Tyler Baker, and led by CEO George Grey, Foundries.io has developed a transformative, open-source platform – FoundriesFactory, that provides OEMs and Systems Integrators a common software base to develop, test, deploy, manage, and maintain secure IoT and Edge devices through a single cloud-native solution. As a result, companies can now ensure the lifetime support of connected devices, unlock innovation, and improve speed-to-market while saving time and money.

George Grey, CEO of Foundries.io says, “The industry needs a new cloud DevOps approach to IoT that’s built from the ground up to reinvent how software is developed and deployed. We believe the latest software is always the most secure and most trusted, so we have created the FoundriesFactory platform to deliver to the embedded industry an easy to use cloud-native solution for secure open source-based software development and management.”

Grey further adds, “OEMs can now couple their hardware innovations to a secure, production-tested base software platform, enabling freedom of choice of enterprise software and cloud providers using containerised applications and services.”

What does FoundriesFactory offer?

The FoundriesFactory software platform reinvents IoT by offering a secure, customisable, Linux-based platform with fleet management services, for the world’s connected devices – using a fixed no royalty subscription model.

Now, product teams gain enhanced data security while reducing the cost of developing, testing and deploying devices across their installed lifetime. The company mentions, “Our open-source platform interfaces to any cloud and offers maximum flexibility for hardware configuration so organisations can focus on what matters: IP, applications, and value add.

In this regard, Foundries.io claims to count tier-one OEMs, silicon industry leaders, and SoC companies among its customers and partners, including ARM, NXP Semiconductors, MontaVista, STMicroelectronics and WINSYSTEMS.

Ed Stacey, Managing Partner at IQ Capital, says, “Foundries.io is leading an industry-wide movement to secure any software running on connected edge devices. Device security is currently a major bottleneck to full IoT adoption – and is likely to remain so while embedded engineering talent continues to be in short supply. With a growing list of global Tier-1 customer advocates, and influential open-source developers supporting its platform, Foundries.io is set to transform the way that Edge devices are designed, delivered and managed.”

Ian Drew, Chairman of Foundries.io adds, “The IoT industry is ripe for a horizontal platform that allows OEMs to own their data and security strategies, without being locked-in. Governments are setting security standards around the world for consumers and enterprise devices that will need to be met. The market is tripling in the next decade for IoT devices and so we are ready for this inflection point.”

About the investor – IQ Capital

It is a deeptech venture capital firm based in London and Cambridge that invests in early-stage deeptech businesses which use hard-to-replicate technology in massive global markets – across sectors including software, hardware, materials, health tech and life sciences. The firm invests at Seed and Series A stage from £0.5M to £10M (approx €582K to €11.65M), with capacity for follow-on investment up to £30M (approx €34.95M) through its Growth Fund.

IQ Capital has invested in more than 45 companies that it believes are visionaries and address some of the largest problems in the world. Its team has achieved over 20 exits, to companies including M&A to Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle and several IPOs. It has also led over 30 investments in the last three years in companies including Thought Machine, Privitar, FNA, Paragraf, causaLens, Neurovalens, Concirrus, Fluidic Analytics, CybSafe, Nyobolt.