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IoT connectivity provider Sigfox has announced the closure of what it calls a ‘record’ series E funding round of €150m (£128m) – and vows to create a truly worldwide network with the capital.
From Finland, to Mexico, and even Antarctica, the company’s efforts to put together a low-cost, low-energy wireless network around the globe – 26 countries and more than 10 million objects registered thus far – has seen impressive growth. Now, the plan is to move to 60 countries by 2018 as well as break even financially.
Ludovic Le Moan and Christophe Fourtet, co-founders of Sigfox, issued a joint statement which read: “When we met in 2010, we agreed that Sigfox could change the world by bringing the virtual and physical worlds together through a new paradigm based on the fundamental principles of astrophysics. Today, we have created the equivalent of the world’s largest radio telescope for IoT. Our network is able to connect hundreds of billions of objects to the Internet through advanced radio techniques.”
The most recent funding round saw six new VC firms join the list of existing investors. Alto Invest, Salesforce Ventures, Henri Seydoux, Swen CP, Tamer Group and Total have invested, alongside existing shareholders including Bpifrance, Elliott, Intel Capital, Air Liquide, Idinvest Partners and IXO.
For Total, the growth of Industry 4.0 and predictive maintenance, as well as the network to back it up, was seen as a key reason to invest. “It is their advance acquired on the market in a short time and their capacity to accelerate the deployment of large scale IoT solutions that motivated our investment,” said Patrick Pouyanne, Total chairman and CEO in a statement.
Sigfox also said it plans to integrate with Salesforce’s IoT Cloud. The press materials noted the partnership idea was for the two to unlock “insights from the connected world that empower any business to take the right action, for the right customer, at the right time across global consumer and business use cases.”
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