Silicon Valley startup FogHorn Systems raises $12M in Series A

FogHorn Systems, a software developer for industrial and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) applications, announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by March Capital and GE Ventures. Additional Series A funding was provided by Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Darling Ventures. “This is the largest initial round of funding raised by a Silicon Valley startup focused on IoT edge analytics and fog computing. Our investors include major strategic players in the Industrial IoT sector with participation from global leaders based in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region,” said David C. King, CEO, FogHorn. In addition to welcoming these companies as strategic investment partners, we will work with each of them to develop breakthrough IoT solutions for their industrial and commercial customers. FogHorn claims that it’s technology incorporates high-performance edge processing, real-time analytics and heterogeneous machine learning applications to be hosted as closely as possible to the source of high-volume and high-velocity operations technology (OT) machine data. This, the company explains, enables customers to achieve greater operating efficiencies (increases in runtime, throughput and yield, or reductions in machine outages, scrap material and energy usage) and to detect anomalous conditions that can impact individual asset or site-wide performance. “Ingesting sensor data at the edge and then simply publishing everything to a cloud environment for processing is not practical or advisable in most industrial settings,” said Sastry Malladi, CTO, FogHorn CTO. He further explained, “The sheer amount of data generated by industrial machines and factories can easily exceed available bandwidth, and it would be cost prohibitive to send that data to the cloud. Moreover, some machines and processes require automated responses within a few seconds or even milliseconds. By the time uploaded data is processed in a data center and the results transferred back to the edge, it often arrives too late. This is where FogHorn’s edge intelligence is truly revolutionary.” Michael Dolbec, Head of Ventures and Business Development, GE Digital, said:

The Industrial Internet enables organizations to leverage and act on analytic insights from their machines, equipment, and operations. Realizing this vision requires distributed edge-to-cloud computing and machine learning, and we are excited to have leading technology innovators like FogHorn as part of our Predix ecosystem.

In addition to applying intelligence at the edge where IoT devices operate, the FogHorn IoT platform claims to significantly lower cloud-related bandwidth costs by refocusing the role of the cloud to very specific functions such as application portability and provisioning orchestration, machine learning and advanced cloud/edge analytics. “The market opportunity for IoT is vast, not only in the industrial sector, but in Bosch’s smart building and connected vehicle businesses as well. We look forward to working with FogHorn’s groundbreaking edge analytics technology and fog computing applications platform,” said Luis Llovera, Managing Director, Robert Bosch LLC.