digital transformation. One claim to fame: Co-founder Shawn Fanning developed early music sharing service Napster.
Helium Helium remote sensor for environmental monitoring
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: Pulled in $20 million in Series A funding, led by NEA, in June, bringing total funding to nearly $26M.
Focus: The company touts its “Google Street View” for public internet-connected devices that provides data vital for tracking and protecting them. The company, whose founders met while working as consultants at DARPA, have created a sensing platform and Web-based tool dubbed Expander that has enabled Qadium to collect and showcase a huge amount of data whose possible applications are still being explored, though CEO and Co-Founder Tim Junio stresses that Qadium’s government work is all about defense – not offensive cyber warfare. (More on Qadium here.)
Founded: 2015
Headquarters: Tokyo
Funding: $33.8M, including $22M and $5.8M in a pair of Series B rounds earlier this year.
Focus: Internet of things-oriented mobile virtual network operator, with initial presence in Asia via NTT Docomo, but expanding its reach worldwide. Provides subscriber identity modules for individual devices to be managed in numerous ways, including via the cloud, which can be leveraged to offload high-load processing such as encryption. Supports a range of communications technology from LTE/3G to Low Power Wide Area (LoRaWAN), the latter of which enables data transmission over very long distances at low power.
MORE: Beware ticking Internet of Things security time bomb