Our Investment in Golioth: Commercial IOT Development Platform Built for Scale
Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in Golioth, a provider of turnkey enterprise software infrastructure for hardware companies to securely connect their devices to the cloud, with participation from Differential, Zetta Venture Partners, and MongoDB.
The adoption of cloud-connected devices has become ubiquitous over the past few years and is currently accelerating as new use cases emerge and investments in operational efficiency quicken. The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming the Internet of Everything (IoE). Led by an embedded systems expert who was an early Product Manager at Nest, Golioth is building the developer platform that provides 10X leverage to teams solving the biggest challenges in digital infrastructure.
Golioth solves the large and growing issue of connecting hardware devices to the cloud.
Connecting hardware devices to the cloud and having them function as intended is exceptionally difficult and time-consuming; this problem is exacerbated for hardware developers with little to no experience managing cloud applications. To connect and control these devices, cloud architects must contend with many applications spanning machine learning, communication, and data storage.Today, there isn’t a centralized platform/workspace for hardware and software developers to collaborate on the development of connected devices. Hardware and IoT companies lack the deep knowledge that is becoming ubiquitous in the software world around general cloud services like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Skilled engineering talent for these software capabilities is scarce. Hardware companies often struggle to scale software capabilities due to competition with pure play software firms.
Golioth empowers hardware engineers and teams to efficiently decrease the time and cost required to bring connected IOT devices to market.
Golioth’s platform connects existing or new hardware products to the cloud through a general purpose platform that unites hardware and software protocols. The company’s solution is middleware that allows hardware developers to quickly and effortlessly connect their products while remaining hardware and cloud agnostic. Golioth standardizes tough-to-build IOT capabilities and offers them to hardware developers on day one of their development cycles. Golioth’s long term vision is to become the de facto developer platform for IOT devices and provide the infrastructure orchestration layer for device to cloud interoperability and connectivity. Golioth has the potential to enable countless new applications within IOT and connected devices in a similar way that Stripe enabled a cambrian explosion of new application use cases through embedded transactions and Twilio gave rise to a new paradigm shift of in application communications.
Golioth is the bridge for technologies that drastically increase industrial efficiency and decrease carbon emissions.
Golioth’s platform is part of a fundamental infrastructure shift that enables new innovation within the IOT and connected hardware markets. Market analysts expect the IoT market to reach $194B in 2022 and grow 22% year-over-year to $525B by 2027. Research from Mckinsey also shows that 127 new devices connect to the internet every second, while IoT is projected to have an annual economic impact between $4-11T by 2025. The growing IoT devices market is a strong macro for combating climate change since connected devices weave in greater intelligence for energy efficiency and intelligent resource utilization. Consumers, businesses, and government organizations are usingIoT platforms to enable efficiency across a wide range of markets, including individual homes, entire cities, connected vehicles, manufacturing, supply chain and energy/utilities. The proliferation of 5G and improvements in other network protocols such as Wifi 6 have provided customers with a broader range of connectivity options; these options, in turn, boost capacity, speed, latency, and reliability while also fitting into their technical requirements.
Source: IoT Analytics
Golioth is in a strong position in their post seed phase from both a team and product position.
The company was founded by Jonathan Beri (CEO) who was an early product manager at Nest and subsequently spent six years at Google leading their IOT platform development group. Brian Rucker (Head of Ops) has ten years of experience split between technical management, revenue operations, and strategy. He was a senior strategy manager at Comcast, focused on connected living and WiFi. Brian was also the director of business development at Praescient Analytics, working with federal agencies and private companies. He also spent time as a senior counterintelligence agent in the US Army. Jonathan’s focus on closing key hires has paid off with recent additions of a Head of Marketing, Product Manager, and Staff Engineer. For insight on open roles at Golioth – check out their careers page on Blackhorn’s website. Golioth’s platform is now GA for developers and support embedded engineers Golioth created a library of free reference designs using their platform including:
