FogHorn Systems today announced it has received a Series B round of funding totaling $30 million to support its disruptive innovation in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) edge computing market segment. Intel Capital and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures led the round, with new investor Honeywell Ventures and all previous investors participating, including Series A investors March Capital Partners, GE, Dell Technologies Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Darling Ventures and seed investor The Hive. This new round brings FogHorn's total funding to $47.5 million and will be used to significantly expand the company's engineering resources and global go-to-market presence.
"This major round of funding by many of the world's largest and most innovative technology and industrial companies will enable FogHorn to continue its drive for industry-first innovation in the IIoT market segment," said David C. King, CEO of FogHorn. "We have seen unprecedented interest from customers and partners in a huge variety of industries for advanced condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, asset performance management and process optimization solutions."
FogHorn recently extended its technology leadership position in the IIoT market segment by introducing Lightning ML, the world's first edge machine learning solution. Built on top of FogHorn's pioneering CEP (complex event processing)-driven edge analytics software launched in 2016, Lightning ML breaks new ground by giving industrial customers the ability to train and execute machine learning algorithms and other advanced data science models on streaming sensor data right at the source of the data. This facilitates the creation and iterative enhancement of "digital twins" and other sophisticated machine learning and AI models without the need to send all the sensor data to a cloud or data center for processing.
"Both the promise and challenge of IIoT lie in the ability to convert sensor data to actionable insights that improve customers' operating efficiency and generate new sources of business value," said Jonathan Ballon, Vice President and General Manager of Intel's IoT Group. "As we've watched FogHorn's progress with both leading IIoT solutions providers and major industrial end customers, we believe their edge analytics and machine learning technology will be a critical factor in enabling those operating efficiencies and delivering that business value."
"For the oil and gas industry, harnessing IIoT insights will produce significant operating savings and spur major process improvements," said Cory Steffek, Managing Director North America of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV). "We believe innovators like FogHorn will lead the way in redefining IIoT edge computing to deliver real-time analytics and machine learning value across our entire business -- upstream, midstream and downstream."
With more than 20 billion IoT-connected devices expected by 2020, according to Gartner's latest projections, FogHorn investor GE estimates that the industrial internet market segment will grow to $225 billion in that timeframe. Unleashing digital industrial transformation requires solving a fundamental computing challenge. That challenge: How to generate actionable insights from all the real-time streaming data constantly being emitted by the profusion of physical, video/audio and other edge sensors deployed in any industrial environment -- whether in manufacturing, energy, resources, transportation, smart cities or smart buildings -- without the transport and hosting costs, cybersecurity risk and operational latency associated with sending all that operations technology data across a network to a public/private cloud or remote data center.
"FogHorn's unique edge analytics and machine learning capabilities are a great complement to our existing technologies," said Murray Grainger, Managing Director and Head of Honeywell Ventures. "Combining advanced software solutions with great physical products to provide increased value for our customers is central to Honeywell's transformation into a leading software-industrial company. We are excited that FogHorn represents Honeywell Ventures' inaugural investment and we are committed to helping FogHorn scale faster through access to Honeywell's customers, channels, and global presence."
Join FogHorn
FogHorn is hiring in its Mountain View and Pune, India locations across departments. To learn more about open positions, please visit: https://www.foghorn.io/careers/
About FogHorn Systems
FogHorn is a leading developer of "edge intelligence" software for industrial and commercial IoT application solutions. FogHorn's Lightning software platform brings the power of advanced analytics and machine learning to the on-premises edge environment enabling a new class of applications for advanced monitoring and diagnostics, machine performance optimization, proactive maintenance and operational intelligence use cases. FogHorn's technology is ideally suited for OEMs, systems integrators and end customers in manufacturing, oil and gas, power and water, transportation, renewable energy, mining and agriculture, as well as Smart Building, Smart City and connected vehicle applications. FogHorn was recently included in the "Cool Vendors in IoT Edge Computing, 2017" report by Gartner, Inc.