German software startup Emteria has recently announced to have secured $1.5 million (nearly €1.38 million) funding from German High-Tech Gründerfonds and Runa Capital, an international VC fund.
The Aachen-based company is known for its emteria.OS — which is described as a regularly updated “industrial” version of Android and by default offers a variety of apps, including a browser, email client, hardware-accelerated video player, and file manager.
Currently, Android is the most popular operating system (OS) with over 2.5 million active Android devices including smartphones, TVs and appliances. However, as pure Android is not suited to work in an industrial environment, this is where emteria.OS, an adapted Android OS for business environments plays the role.
“The B2B market has so far failed to leverage the Android platform at scale, even though it has reached a market share of more than 70% for mobile operating systems. In the B2B environment, this development leaves much to be desired – you may find elaborately adapted Android versions that lack updates, age quickly, and in general cannot meet their full potential,” Dr. Igor Kalkov, founder and CEO of emteria says. “Our vision is to free industrial devices from their individualised software, just like the mobile revolution.”
The OS is aimed at businesses, with Emteria suggesting the system could run apps used in everything from vending machines and digital signage to point of sale and industrial control devices.
The emteria.OS can be also used to build products such as ticket scanning devices, ticketing machines, cashier desks, video conferencing systems, smart home controllers, and alarming systems.
Intends to expand operations
With the latest funding, Emteria aims to expand its business capabilities and attract more industrial customers. Founded by Igor Kalkov in 2017, Emteria already has over 75,000 users across the world. The OS also supports Raspberry Pi 4 and industrial hardware platforms from NXP, Qualcomm and Rockchip. Further, it also supports Raspberry Pi 3B/B+ and Raspberry Pi CM3.
“We are very convinced of this technology’s potential in the field of industrial operating systems,” Daniela Bach, Investment Manager at HTGF, said. “The team combines technical expertise, market knowledge, and a feel for the specific requirements of customers. We are pleased to be able to support emteria on its way.“
“The team has reached great success among the Raspberry Pi community by developing an important layer for device configuration and management not available from the open source Android,” Dmitry Galperin, Partner at Runa Capital, added. “We believe that emteria will continue to attract more IoT developers. Obviously, the team itself and the community in general benefit from the flourishing ecosystem of Android developer tools and a broad spectrum of periphery hardware built to support Android out of the box.”
Main image picture credits: emteria
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