Redwood City, CA, Sept. 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Redwood City, California – Runtime, a start-up leveraging open source for connected devices, today announced its initial $7.5 million in funding from investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Foundation Capital, and DHVC.
“The number of connected IoT devices vary from huge to incredulous, and it’s clear that the vast majority will be low cost, constrained devices that don’t utilize Linux or Android,” said Runtime co-founder and CEO, James Pace. “A critical missing link to fuel such growth is effectively managing billions of connected devices. In order to realize value, we need to reliably and cost-effectively manage them beyond ‘the edge’.”
Scores of companies around the world are already deploying Runtime for Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) implementations including smart cities, agriculture, fleet management, smart security, and more. CEO James Pace and CTO Sterling Hughes, co-founders and proven leaders in the field of implementing and scaling large IoT-connected deployments, are leading the company.
“There are many obstacles when deploying IoT, from security to connectivity to massive data collection, and an open source framework is imperative from the start,” said Greg Papadopoulos, Venture Partner at NEA. “We’ve seen how Linux and Android disrupted entire industries. Runtime is poised to succeed because of its foundational work with Apache Mynewt. From the device itself and into the cloud, we believe Runtime has what it takes to effectively manage the complexity IoT developers face.”
Using open source for connected devices, developers can achieve an IoT framework composed of a range of many kinds of devices. Runtime has been fully supporting Apache Mynewt to ensure developers don't get locked in to proprietary vendor SDKs, and is working daily with the hundreds of developers on their deployments. Working to de-risk large scale, critical IoT deployments, Runtime’s end-to-end cloud service is bringing management and lifecycle services to enable at-scale deployments, fewer delays and errors during development, less technical debt and wasted resources working on embedded components.
Foundation Capital general partner Steve Vassallo commented, “We’re thrilled to back Runtime in the earliest stages. We worked closely with this team through our investment in Silver Spring Networks and know first-hand how capable they are of providing coherence to huge fleets of high-value, connected devices.”
DHVC managing director Kevin Ding said, “IIoT has fast become an international phenomenon, from Asia to Europe companies are offering valuable services, software and hardware, and existing organizations are trying to find ways to marry physical and cyber worlds, not only to remain competitive, but to give customers relevant products and services. Developers who embrace an open source foundation will succeed, and Runtime has the experience to bring solutions to help developers scale efficiently and quickly.”
Thousands of devices are running Apache Mynewt, a modular real-time operating system for MCU-class connected devices that operate for long times under power, memory, and storage constraints. By 2018, the number of connected Apache Mynewt devices is predicted to be in the millions. Enabling a variety of embedded devices, such as wearables, light bulbs, locks, doorbells, and others, Apache Mynewt addresses these constraints in a hardware-agnostic way. This flexibility gives developers the ability to use a variety of microcontrollers (ARM, MIPS, RISC V) and sensors, and choose from many of today’s popular IoT communication standards (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN), without being tied to a single vendor or re-factoring architectures.
Runtime has supported the Apache Mynewt community since the beginning, offering developers low power, wireless connectivity. Last month, Runtime announced it was awarded the Open Connectivity Foundation’s (OCF) ‘Outstanding Contributor Award’ for its open source implementation of OIC Core Specification v1.1.0. Runtime’s commercial cloud solution is predicated on Apache Mynewt.
About Runtime
Runtime provides cloud-based management of connected devices and is a complete solutions provider for consumer, medical, commercial, and industrial IoT applications. Free, open source software is essential to all Runtime offerings. Runtime supports Apache Mynewt, an embedded OS optimized for networking and built for remote management. Apache Mynewt provides the components developers expect from a modern general purpose OS, but for constrained devices that are incapable of running either Linux or Android. Please visit Runtime’s website, follow us on Twitter @runtime_io and check us out on LinkedIn.
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