Mist, a pioneer in smart wireless networking for the smart device era, today announced the close of an over-subscribed $28 million Series B financing, taking the total investment in the company to approximately $43 million. The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with additional funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Cisco Investments. With the latest round of financing, Karim Faris, General Partner at GV, has joined Mist's Board of Directors.

'Mist's cloud-based platform uses advanced machine learning to deliver unprecedented automation and insight. This means that organizations like corporations, hotels, stores, hospitals, and universities can interact with their mobile users in exciting new ways.'
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With this additional investment, Mist will grow sales and marketing resources, continue to invest heavily in engineering and product development, develop a robust channel of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and collaborate with leading ecosystem and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partners.

'The latest round of financing will help us further our goal of delivering amazing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth experiences to the billions of people using smartphones, tablets and laptops,' said Sujai Hajela, CEO and co-founder of Mist. 'At the same time, we are committed to simplifying wireless operations and lowering IT costs by being the first vendor to bring big data and machine learning at web scale to wireless networking.'

'Mist is addressing two of the biggest issues in mobility today: reliable Wi-Fi that is easy to operate at web scale, and accurate Bluetooth location services that are seamless to deploy in any environment,' said GV General Partner Karim Faris. 'Mist's cloud-based platform uses advanced machine learning to deliver unprecedented automation and insight. This means that organizations like corporations, hotels, stores, hospitals, and universities can interact with their mobile users in exciting new ways.'

The Benefits of Mist

The Mist platform lets you think centrally and act locally through a combination of cloud-based intelligence and on premises enterprise-grade Access Points. It is the first wireless platform to use machine learning to automate key tasks like event correlation, location, and clustering to dramatically simplify wireless operations and deliver personalized services to mobile users.

The Mist platform is purpose-built on a modern microservices cloud architecture, ensuring the industry's best scale with unprecedented agility for rolling out or changing services. New 'industry first' features recently added to the Mist platform include:

Business Critical Wi-Fi Assurance Service:

Expanded Service Level Experience (SLE) metrics - Mist is the only wireless platform in the industry that collects ongoing real-time state information from every mobile device on the network. This has numerous benefits, including the ability to set SLE thresholds for critical attributes that impact wireless performance, which now include all of the following parameters: Connection, Coverage, Capacity, Roaming, Throughput (new), Latency (new) and Jitter (new).
One-click root cause analysis. Given the scale and complexity of business networks, it is no longer feasible to look at a multitude of dashboards, event logs, and byte counts to determine the root cause of problems. Mist is the first vendor to use machine learning to convert all this big data into meaningful and actionable insight. For example, IT administrators can easily determine which wired, wireless, and device issues are affecting which users for quick problem identification and remediation.
Enterprise-grade BLE location services:

In addition to being the only wireless platform that leverages virtual BLE (vBLE) beacons to eliminate the setup and management hassles of physical beacons, the Mist platform also now includes:

Real-time visibility into user Radio Frequency (RF) environment - Mist is the only wireless platform in the industry to offer 'RF glasses', which gives administrators a real-time view of the RF environment from the mobile device's perspective. If a wireless user complains about a Wi-Fi or BLE problem, the Mist platform can be used to easily visualize in real-time exactly what their wireless environment looks like for accurate troubleshooting.
BLE Asset tracking - Mist is the first vendor to deliver deep analytics on both Wi-Fi and BLE using a single converged platform (Access Points and cloud). Administrators can easily track the average and maximum number of wireless users or BLE-enabled devices in a given location, the number of visits per zone, who is visiting each zone, and what the wireless experience was during each visit.
BT11 Access Point - The Mist BT11 is an industry-first enterprise-grade Access Point for Bluetooth Low Energy (version 4.2). It has a 16 antenna element steerable directional antenna and one omni-directional element array for the highest location accuracy of any BLE AP on the market. In addition, the BT11 has a dedicated radio for collecting data and sharing it with the Mist cloud for detailed location analytics and high accuracy indoor location services (down to one-meter accuracy with sub-second latency).
About Mist

Mist built the first wireless platform for the Smart Device era. By taking a user-first approach to networking, the Mist Intelligent Wireless Cloud (IWC) eliminates the operational burdens of legacy wireless architectures by replacing human interaction with machine learning and proactive automation. In addition, Mist takes unique advantage of user location and behavior to deliver a superior experience for wireless users and administrators.

The Mist team consists of leading experts in wireless, machine learning, and cloud, who are responsible for building the largest and most advanced networks in the world. Founded in June 2014, the company is based in Cupertino, CA and funded by top investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Cisco Investments. For more information, visit www.mist.com.