Particle Announces $10.4 million Series A Funding

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 17, 2016) - Today Particle, the most widely-used Internet of Things (IoT) platform, announced it has secured $10.4 million in funding to help its community of more than 90,000 developers quickly build, ship and scale enterprise-class IoT solutions.

The round was led by Root Ventures, O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV), and Rincon Venture Partners. This funding allows Particle to continue investing in growing its sales and support teams, and to guide its community toward high value IoT initiatives and connected products.

"IoT has a lot of hype around it, but most of the industry is focused on the window dressing," said Avidan Ross of Root Ventures. "Particle has remained focused on the core challenges within IoT: building secure IoT software and managing IoT devices. With Particle's help, enterprises have been able to make IoT a reality, taking products from prototype to scale quickly."

"Every day we see first-hand the struggles that businesses face developing IoT solutions on schedule and on budget," said Zach Supalla, Particle co-founder and CEO. "Our easy-to-use, secure, and reliable IoT platform allows enterprises to work through roadblocks quickly and come out the other side with a high quality product that provides real business value."

Earlier this year Particle announced Particle Cloud, its enterprise platform that is helping companies to build and ship secure, reliable IoT products in as little as six months. The platform is used by companies ranging in size from startups like Grove and CleverPet to Fortune 500 companies like Keurig and Briggs Healthcare.

To date, Particle has raised $14.6 million in funding from its investors, including a previous Series A round of $4.2 million from Lion Wells Capital, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, SOSventures, Collaborative Fund and angel investors. Back in 2013, the company launched with a Kickstarter campaign raising $567,000.

Particle's approach to making IoT accessible and affordable means companies are able to prototype and iterate without the risk of sinking massive budgets into projects that may never make it to production. Once the product is refined, the same technology used to prototype will serve as the foundation of the final product, making a full-scale roll-out affordable, quick and easy.

In order to provide support throughout the development process, Particle has partnered with many of the most-widely used data and analytics cloud platforms available such as Google, Microsoft, IFTTT, and recently announced a collaboration with Raspberry Pi to bring their devices to the cloud.

"We're excited about the partnership between Raspberry Pi and Particle," said Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Within the next week, 10 Million Raspberry Pi owners, from makers to enterprises, will gain access to a powerful cloud platform to collect data from their Raspberry Pis and control them from anywhere."

To learn more about Particle Cloud, visit www.particle.io/products/platform/particle-cloud.

About Particle
Particle is a scalable, reliable and secure Internet of Things device platform that enables businesses to quickly and easily build, connect and manage their connected solutions. Particle launched on Kickstarter in 2013 with the vision of making the Internet of Things easy and accessible. Particle's tools are now used by 70,000 engineers in more than 170 countries and are being used by many Fortune 500 companies to develop and manage fleets of new IoT products. Their portfolio includes a cellular platform and cellular hardware development kits including the Electron and Photon. Particle was listed as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2015 and its CEO, Zach Supalla, has spoken as an authority on the Internet of Things at prominent events such as OSCON, Solid, Web Summit, GMIC, and Launch.