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Kids’ gaming platform Roblox raises $150M

Published September 5, 2018

Roblox, which allows kids to create 3D worlds and games, has raised an additional $150 million in funding.

The company didn’t disclose its valuation in the announcement, but a source with knowledge of the deal told us that it valued Roblox at more than $2.5 billion — the price that Microsoft paid to acquire Minecraft four years ago.

“This is a big year for us that fortifies the dream,” said co-founder and CEO David Baszucki .

Earlier this year, Roblox announced that it had become cash-flow positive, and Baszucki told me the company remains “extremely profitable.” So why raise more money?

“First and foremost, the reason to fundraise is to have a war chest, to have a buffer, to have the opportunity to do acquisitions, to have a strong balance sheet as we grow internationally,” he said.

In order to support that growth, Baszucki said Roblox will be opening offices in some regions like China (“most likely with a partner that hasn’t been announced yet”), but it also requires building out infrastructure like local language and local payment support.

Roblox has now raised a total of $185 million in equity funding. The new round was led by Greylock Partners and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Altos Ventures, Index Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and others.

Greylock’s David Sze has had big successes in both gaming and social media, having backed Facebook, LinkedIn, SGN and others. But he said Roblox is the first company he’s seen to “unify those two together on a platform in a magical kind of way.”

Apparently, Sze has known Baszucki for a long time — their kids went to the same school, and Sze remembered Baszucki bringing an early version of Roblox to the science fair. Gaming companies can be a risky investment, because their business relies on creating new hits, but Sze said Roblox is different.

“They aren’t making the games,” Sze said. “They’re letting the long tail of developers develop all the games on the platform, they’re let users decide what the successes are. It’s much more like a YouTube or much more like an Apple with the App Store.”

In a blog post about the funding, Sze even suggested that some of the next big gaming franchises could emerge from the Roblox platform, a prediction he repeated in our interview

“I’d be surprised if there aren’t some huge, high quality games that aren’t originated on Roblox in the next three-to-five years,” he said.

Roblox says it now has more than 70 million monthly active users, with more than 4 million creators who have built more than 40 million-plus experiences.

Of course, having a big platform with lots of user-generated content also creates risks — as illustrated in a recent incident where characters mimed gang raping a young girl’s avatar. (Roblox said a single server had been hacked, allowing users to upload code that violated the company’s rules.)

Asked whether these risks gave him any pause, Sze said, “User protection, user safety, all the aspects of having of having youth on your platform, it takes those things extremely seriously.”

“Are we perfect? No,” he said. “But I can tell you from inside the company that it’s an incredibly high priority. They’ve already done lots of things to help protect and make the user experience the best, and they have a list of stuff that they’re already working on.”

I’ll be interviewing Baszucki on-stage at Disrupt SF this afternoon, so stay tuned to TechCrunch (or come on out to the event!) for more on the funding and his future plans.

This story has been updated with the corrected amount for Roblox’s total funding.

AnchorFree, maker of Hotspot Shield, raises $295 million in new funding

Published September 5, 2018

AnchorFree, a maker of a popular virtual private networking app, has raised $295 million in a new round of funding, the company announced Wednesday.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based app maker’s flagship app Hotspot Shield ranks as one of the most popular VPN apps on the market. The app, based on a freemium model, allows users across the world tunnel their internet connections through AnchorFree’s servers, which masks users’ browsing histories from their internet providers and allows those under oppressive regimes evade state-level censorship.

The app has 650 million users in 190 countries, the company said, and also has a business-focused offering.

The funding was led by WndrCo, a holding company focusing on consumer tech businesses, in addition to Accel Partners, 8VC, SignalFire, and Green Bay Ventures, among others.

“The WndrCo team brings deep operational experience in launching and scaling global tech products, and we look forward to working closely with them in pursuit of our mission to provide secure access to the world’s information for every person on the planet,” said AnchorFree’s chief executive David Gorodyansky in remarks.

The news was first reported by The New York Times.

Snapchat adds new styles as Spectacles V2s get used 40% more than V1

Published September 5, 2018

Snapchat isn’t revealing sales numbers of version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but at least they’re not getting left in a drawer as much as the V1s. The company tells me V2 owners are capturing 40 percent more Snaps than people with V1s.

And today, Snapchat is launching two new black-rimmed hipster styles of Spectacles V2 — a Wayfarer-esque Nico model and a glamorous big-lensed Veronica model. Both come with a slimmer semi-soft black carrying case instead of the chunky old triangular yellow one, and are polarized for the first time. They look a lot more like normal sunglasses, compared to the jokey, bubbly V1s, so they could appeal to a more mature and fashionable audience. They go on sale today for $199 in the US and Europe and will be sold in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom later this year, while the old styles remain $149.

The new Spectacles styles (from left): Veronica and Nico

Spectacles V2 original style (left) and V1 (right)

Snap is also trying to get users to actually post what they capture, so it’s planning an automatically curated Highlight Story feature that will help you turn your best Specs content into great things to share. That could address the problem common amongst GoPro users of shooting a ton of cool footage but never editing it for display.

The problem is that V1 were pretty exceedingly unpopular, and those that did buy them. Snap only shipped 220,000 pairs and reportedly had hundreds of thousands more gathering dust in a warehouse. It took a $40 million write-off and its hardware “camera company” strategy was called into question. Business Insider reported that less than 50 percent of buyers kept using them after a month and a “sizeable” percentage stopped after just a week.

The new styles come with a slimmer semi-soft carry case

That means the bar was pretty low from which to score a 40 percent increase in usage, especially given the V2s take photos, work underwater, come in a slimmer charging case, and lack the V1s’ bright yellow ring around the camera lens that announces you’re wearing a mini computer on your face. Snap was smart to finally let you export in non-circular formats which are useful for sharing beyond Snapchat, and let you automatically save Snaps to your camera roll and not just its app’s Memories feature.

I’ve certainly been using my V2s much more than the V1s since they’re more discrete and versatile. And I haven’t encountered as much fear or anxiety from people worried about being filmed as privacy norms around technology continue to relax.

Why Snapchat Spectacles failed

But even with the improved hardware, new styles, and upcoming features, Spectacles V2 don’t look like they’re moving the needle for Snapchat. After shrinking in user count last quarter, Snap’s share price has fallen to just a few cents above its all-time low. Given most of its users are cash-strapped teens who aren’t going to buy Spectacles even if they’re cool, the company needs to focus on how to make its app for everyone more useful and differentiated after the invasion of Instagram’s copy-cats of its Stories and ephemeral messaging.

Whether that means securing tentpole premium video content for Discover, redesigning Stories to ditch the interstitials for better lean-back viewing, or developing augmented reality games, Snap can’t stay the course. Despite its hardware ambitions, it’s fundamentally a software company. It has to figure out what makes that software special.

Snapchat launches Spectacles V2, camera glasses you’ll actually wear

German mobility startup Wunder Mobility raises $30M Series B

Published September 5, 2018

Wunder Mobility, the Hamburg-based startup that provides a range of mobility services, from carpooling to electric scooter rentals, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by KCK Group, with participation from previous backer Blumberg Capital and other non-disclosed investors.

The German company says the investment will be used to expand the company’s engineering team in its home country and to establish an international B2B sales organisation. Currently, Wunder Mobility has 70 employees working from four offices in Asia, Germany, and South America. The aim is to add another 100 employees over the next twelve months in the areas of product development and B2B sales.

Founded in Hamburg in 2014, but now with an international focus, including emerging markets, Wunder Mobility supplies software, hardware, and operational services for various “future-oriented” mobility concepts. These span smart shuttles, fleet management and carpooling, reaching more than two million users in a dozen countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, India, and the Philippines.

“We are enabling communities on four continents to address the global traffic challenge and to deploy more sustainable mobility options faster by hosting a full-stack urban mobility tech platform,” explains founder and CEO Gunnar Froh.

“Our three product lines either allow private people to share empty seats with people headed in the same direction (Wunder Carpool), match professional drivers with passengers in 6-10 seater vans (Wunder Shuttle), or give travellers the option to rent vehicles (electric scooters, cars) by the minute (Wunder Fleet)”.

In recent months, transport companies as well as customers from the automotive industry in Japan, Europe and America have committed to using Wunder technology. The company is already processing around one million trips per month worldwide.

To that end, Froh describes Wunder Mobility’s typical B2C customers as the emerging middle class in mega cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Manila or Dehli.

“Many of these customers commute to work every day for several hours, are often first-time car owners and are open to sharing empty seats in their cars in order save on gas and car expenses,” he says.

On the B2B side, the startup’s customers are large OEMs, and public transit companies or suppliers, such as the Japanese conglomerate Marubeni. “We are working with Marubeni on ambitious new mobility services worldwide,” adds Froh.

Meanwhile, Wunder Mobility’s competitors are cited as Via in New York on the shuttle side. In Europe it perhaps competes most directly with Berlin’s Door2Door, and Vulog in Paris.

Expanding its internet service to more countries in Africa, Tizeti raises $3 million

Published September 4, 2018

Tizeti, the Nigerian internet service provider behind the brand Wifi.com.ng, has raised $3 million in a new round of funding as it expands its unlimited internet service into Ghana.

The new financing was led by 4DX Ventures, a new, Africa-focused fund that’s been deploying capital at an incredibly fast clip since its launch earlier this year. Its portfolio includes Sokowatch, a startup connecting local African retailers to international suppliers; the outsourced programmer placement and apprenticeship service, Andela; and the integrated pharmacy supplier and operator, mPharma.

For Walter Baddoo, one of 4DX Ventures co-founders and a new addition to the Tizeti board, the value in a company that operates as “the Comcast of Africa” was clear.

“If you take the efficiency of point to multipoint wireless technology and you add to that solar infrastructure, you leap-frog a generation of infrastructure. That makes getting cheap data to the hands of customers much easier,” Baddoo says.

Tizeti does exactly that. Using solar energy to power its wireless towers, the company provides residences, businesses, events and conferences with unlimited high-speed broadband internet access, which now covers more than 70 percent of Lagos. Since its launch from Y Combinator’s winter 2017 batch, the company has installed over 7,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria with 150,000 users.

Tizeti co-founders Ifeanyi Okonkwo and Kendall Ananyi

In November, the company partnered with Facebook to offer Express Wi-Fi and roll out hundreds of hotspots across the Nigerian capital of Abuja.

Now, with the new funding, Tizeti is expanding its operations outside of Nigeria, launching a new brand — Wifi.Africa — and pushing its service into Ghana.

“Tizeti was built to tackle poor internet connectivity not only in Nigeria, but on the continent as a whole, by developing a cost-effective solution from inception to delivery, for reliable and uncapped internet access for potentially millions of Africans,” said Kendall Ananyi, the co-founder and chief executive of Tizeti.

The company’s unlimited internet packages cost $30 per-month, a price it’s able to achieve through the use of cheap solar electricity to power its towers.

“Reducing the cost of data in Africa is a critical step in accelerating the pace of internet adoption across the continent,” Baddoo said in a statement. “Tizeti makes it easier and cheaper to connect Africa to the global digital economy and we are excited to partner with Kendall and his team on this mission.”

All of this is being powered by a network of new undersea cables stretching along the ocean floor that is bringing connectivity to the continent.

“There’s a ton of capacity going to 16 submarine cables [coming into Africa],” Ananyi told us back in 2017. “The problem is getting the internet to the customers. You have balloons and drones and that will work in the rural areas but it’s not effective in urban environments. We solve the internet problem in a dense area.”

It’s not a radical concept, and it’s one that has netted the company 3,000 subscribers already and nearly $1.2 million in annual recorded revenue in its first months of operations, Ananyi told us at the time.

“There are 1.2 billion people in Africa, but only 26 percent of them are online and most get internet over mobile phones,” says Ananyi. Perhaps only 6 percent of that population has an internet subscription, he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Steve Song

Thoma Bravo buys majority stake in Apttus in unexpected ending

Published September 4, 2018

Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on top of the Salesforce platform that looked to be heading toward an IPO in recent years has taken a different tack, instead being acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo today.

The company did not reveal the purchase price, but said it could be ready to share more details about the arrangement after the deal closes, probably next month. “What we can say is that Apttus views this development positively and believes Thoma Bravo can instill greater operational excellence, strengthen our market leadership and allow us to continue providing indispensable value to our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

They are describing this not as a full on acquisition, but as ‘taking a majority stake’. However you describe it, it probably wasn’t the ending the company envisioned after taking $404 million in investment since launching in 2006, one of the earliest startups to build a business on top of the Salesforce platform.

If the company believed that Salesforce would eventually buy it, that never happened. In fact, that dream probably went out the window when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a similar company also built on Salesforce, at the end of 2015 for $360 million.

In spite of this, in an interview in 2016, CEO Kirk Krappe still was confident that an exit was coming, either by IPO or a possibly a Salesforce acquisition.

“We will be IPOing this year. That may be a function to figure what Salesforce wants to do and they may think about that [after purchasing SteelBrick at the end of last year]. There’s no reason they can’t buy us too. For me, I have to run the business, and we’re growing 100 percent year on year. If Salesforce came to the table, that would be great if the numbers work. If not, we have an amazingly strong business,” he said at the time.

That never came to pass of course, and the company tried to separate itself from Salesforce in April of 2016 when it released a version of Apttus that would work on Microsoft Dynamics. Krappe saw this as a way to show investors he wasn’t completely married to the Salesforce platform.

While Salesforce provided a system of record around the customer information and all that involved, once the salesperson actually closed in on a sale, that’s when software like Apttus came into play, allowing the company to generate a detailed proposal, a contract once the deal was agreed upon and finally collecting and recording the money from the sale.

Apttus took its last funding rounds in Sept 2017 for $55 million and later a debt financing round for another $75 million in February this year, according to data on Crunchbase.

Thoma Bravo has bought a number of enterprise software products over the years including Qlik, Sailpoint, Dynatrace, Solar Winds and others. Apttus should fit in well with that family of companies.

Behind the turnaround that netted Vinted €50 million

Published September 4, 2018

It was May 2016 when Thomas Plantenga got the call.

He was living in New York and working on projects with Fabrice Grinda — the co-founder of classified juggernaut OLX and the founder of FJ Labs. Plantenga had worked with Grinda on expanding OLX and was ready for the next challenge — which came in the form of the used clothing marketplace, Vinted.

The invitation came from Insight Venture Partners and it was an offer to help work with one of their portfolio companies — a former high flyer that had fallen on hard times.

“They sold me on the story,” said Plantenga on a call from Vilnius, Lithuania, where he moved to take the reins at the used clothing startup.

“The business was completely burning down and I was hanging out with them,” said Plantenga. “In those five weeks I connected with both the co-founders and wrote a very aggressive plan of how to completely change things and really change the direction… I said ‘fuck it.’ If you’re going to be betting everything and everyone on this… let’s stick around.”

Plantenga proposed severe austerity measures for the used clothing exchange. The company shuttered its offices in San Francisco, London, Munich and Paris, and slashed headcount from 240 to 150 and automated the processes of content moderation.

There was a strategic shift in product development, as well. The company focused on trust and safety between buyers and sellers and concentrated on two core markets: Germany and France. And, as Milda Mitkute, the company’s co-founder, told Forbes in an article earlier this year, the company shifted from a mandatory sales fee to a free product with additional paid services (like promotional marketing on the platform for sellers). Between January and December 2017, Vinted processed $360 million in sales.

The turnaround not only saved the company but had investors come knocking at the door. Last week, Sprints Capital led the €50 million financing that also included Burda Media and Insight Venture Partners (along with Grinda’s FJ Labs).

“Insight and Accel had the investment written-off to zero and did not expect it to come back,” said Plantenga. What came next was the biggest investment round ever for a Lithuanian startup.

“We started this whole turnaround with something like $14 million in the bank account and we closed the round when we had $10 million of cash,” Plantenga said. Before the weekend the company saw $2 million in sales in a single day. “It was close to zero a little more than two years ago,” said Plantenga.

As a sign of the faith the company has in management, Plantenga said that even though the ownership stake of the founders and executive team has fallen below 50 percent, they still maintain control over the company and the board.

Used clothes may not sound like much of a business, but in Europe, Vinted thinks that roughly $500 billion worth of clothing changes hands across the continent every year.

With so much money on the table, it’s little wonder that Vinted has attracted competition. Companies like Depop, which raised $20 million in January to pursue its own expansion plans for global domination of the used clothing market, are putting their own spin on the marketplace for used clothes.

And the two companies have very different approaches to their market.

“Depop is very smart in branding and positioning themselves as a cool brand that sells cool clothing,” said Plantenga. “And we’re just selling everybody’s clothes. We don’t care whether it’s cool. We just want people to sell their clothes.”

But both companies are on the edge of what Plantenga sees as a massive shift in consumer behavior.

“If we see the super trends of people wanting not to waste and being careful of how they pressure the environment, and all these super trends are becoming a thing,” said Plantenga. “We are hooking in on those super trends. I came from the classified space where you build a horizontal and you monetize cars and real estate, and fashion was a thing that was kind of nice to have. I stuck around because of my own belief that this is something really big.”

These two CRISPR experts are coming to Disrupt SF 2018

Published September 4, 2018

CRISPR, the gene-editing system that could one day change the course of humanity still has a long way to go before we seriously alter anything but it’s not too far-fetched to say it could happen. What’s real and what’s not and just how close are we to radically changing our food supply, medicine and life as we know it as human beings? We’re going to get into all that with Trevor Martin, the co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences and Rachel Haurwitz, the co-founder of Caribou bioscience this week at Disrupt SF 2018.

Trevor Martin is building what he refers to as the biological search engine for CRISPR through his company Mammoth Biosciences. That means using a guide RNA to direct a CRISPR protein to search for any specific DNA or RNA sequence and it could be used to shape the future of bio research. Martin holds a PhD in Biology from Stanford University and received his undergraduate education in biology from Princeton.

Rachel Haurwitz earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the CEO and president of gene editing company Caribou Biosciences, which she co-founded with CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna. Haurwitz also owns several patents covering multiple CRISPR-based technologies.

We’ll be chatting with both of these fascinating people on stage this Thursday at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco about CRISPR and the future of gene editing.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Open source drone software startup Auterion lands $10M seed funding

Published September 4, 2018

Auterion, a startup that offers a drone operating system built on top of the popular PX4 open source software, has landed $10 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Tectonic Ventures.

The young Swiss company says the injection of cash will be used to work closely with the wider PX4 community to further develop the open source code, and to bring the technology to more enterprise customers in the form of the Auterion platform.

Soft-launched earlier this year, Auterion has created a fully-managed operating system for commercial drones and in turn wants to help solve the interoperability problem between drones and services in which there is currently no unifying standard. Getting the industry to come together around a single standard would also help various companies in the drone ecosystem compete better with DJI, which leads the market by a long stretch.

“The commercial drone industry is fragmented,” Auterion co-founder and co-CEO Kevin Sartori tells me. “Satisfying these heterogeneous commercial applications will inevitably demand a broad portfolio of resources and talents to deliver complex vertical solutions. Such complex and complete solutions are difficult for a single vendor to successfully build and deliver. Auterion builds the open infrastructure (operating system) so that suppliers, manufacturers, and service companies can respond the demand in the market and build their product and services on top of global standards.”

A drone operating system runs on the embedded flight controller and on a Linux computer on board of the vehicle. The flight controller takes care of the flight performance and payloads (position, attitude, camera control) whereas the more performing Linux computer can run custom third-party apps like obstacle avoidance, flight performance analytics, and take care of data streaming over LTE. Auterion’s operating system takes care of both and is able to remotely provide software updates to the embedded flight controller and Linux computer.

Meanwhile, to enable the highest possible levels of integration between products, Auterion says it works in close collaboration with other Dronecode members (the body maintaining open source drone software), including 3D Robotics, Airmap, ARM, Intel, NXP, Sony, STMicroelectronics, and Trimble. Auterion is also the largest contributor to the PX4 ecosystem.

Noteworthy is Auterion’s other co-founder, Lorenz Meier. He is the creator of the most widely used open source standards in the drone industry (PX4, Pixhawk, MavLink, and QGC) and was named an MIT Innovator in 2017.

“Open source software on its own is difficult to adopt and there’s no guarantee of functionality,” explains Sartori, likening Auterion’s mission to that of Red Hat. “Auterion packages the open source code into a managed and long-time supported distribution that makes it easy to use for enterprises. We also offer all the supporting services (cloud analytics, predictive maintenance, unmanned traffic management) as a turnkey solution”.

To that end, Sartori says Auterion’s typical customers are drone service providers that buy and maintain a drone fleet to offer services to large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, along with large enterprises that want to offer that service internally within a business unit (e.g. utility companies, police etc). The company also targets drone OEMs that build drones for commercial applications.

Munich Re buys IoT middleware startup, relayr, in deal worth $300M

Published September 4, 2018

Berlin based Internet of Things (IoT) startup relayr, whose middleware platform is geared towards helping industrial companies unlock data insights from their existing machinery and production line kit by linking Internet connected sensors and edge devices to platform controls, has been acquired by insurance group Munich Re in a deal which values the company at $300 million.

relayr was founded back in 2013 with the initial aim of helping software developers hack around with hardware, at a time when developer interest in IoT was just taking off.

The startup went on to pass through startupbootcamp and crowdfunded a cute looking chocolate-bar shaped hardware starter kit before expanding into building a hardware agnostic cloud services platform to act as a central hub for data flows. relayr then further honed its focus to the needs of industrial IoT, and its platform — which is now used by around 130 businesses — offers end-to-end middleware combined with device management and IoT analytics, and can operate in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both depending on customers needs.

We first covered the Berlin-based startup back in 2014 when it closed a $2.3M seed round. It’s raised $66.8M in total, according to Crunchbase, which includes a $30M Series C round in February led by Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners.

relayr did not disclose the investors in its 2014 seed at the time, saying only that they were unnamed U.S. and Switzerland-based investors. But Kleiner Perkins and Munich Re (via its HSB subsidiary which is acquiring relayr now) were named as investors in later rounds, along with Deutsche Telekom .

Insurance giants and telcos have a clear strategic interest in IoT — with the technology promising to drive network usage and utility on the telco side, and offering transformative potential for the insurance industry as data streams can be used to monitor equipment performance and predict (and even steer off) costly failures.

Munich Re said today that its HSB subsidiary is acquiring 100% of relayr in a deal that values the business at $300M. (It’s not clear if it’s all cash or a mix of cash and stock — we’ve asked. Update: A spokeswomen for Munich Re confirmed the transaction will be financed with “internal cash funds” from the group).

It says the deal will help it “shape opportunities in the fast-growing IoT market”, and is envisaging a joint business model with the combined pair developing not just tech solutions for clients but risk management, data analysis and financial instruments.

“IoT is already significantly changing our world and has the potential to disrupt the traditional insurance and reinsurance industry through new business models, services and competitors,” said Torsten Jeworrek, member of Munich Re’s board of management in a statement. “I am truly happy to announce this acquisition, as it supports our strategy to combine our knowledge of risk, data analysis skills and financial strength with the technological expertise of relayr. This is our basis to develop new ideas for tomorrow’s commercial and industrial worlds.”

“We are delighted to strengthen our relationship with Munich Re/HSB to push digitalization in commercial and industrial markets and strive for our mission to help commercial and industrial businesses stay relevant,” added relayr CEO, Josef Brunner. “The unique combination of the companies demonstrates the importance to deliver business outcomes to customers and the need to combine first-class technology and its delivery with powerful financial and insurance offerings. This transaction is a great opportunity to build a global category leader.”

The pair have been partnered since 2016, when the insurance firm invested in relayr’s Series B, but say they see the acquisition strengthening Munich Re’s financial and insurance offerings while also offering a route to expand relayr’s middleware business via leveraging the insurance group’s large client base.

“Back in 2016, HSB invested in relayr in an effort to harness the strategically significant business potential offered by IoT. relayr’s end-to-end IoT solutions for the industrial and commercial sectors are an ideal addition to our Group’s capabilities,” said Greg Barats, president and CEO of HSB, and the person responsible for Munich Re’s IoT strategy, in another supporting statement. “HSB has always focused on insurance and technology… relayr will help us to rapidly implement our global strategy to develop new IoT solutions for our clients. Digital transformation in the industrial and commercial sectors offers opportunities for new services and financial applications.”

relayr says it already offers industrial companies which are seeking to digitalise their businesses a “comprehensive range of services” — such as being able to extract and analyse data from machines and equipment to determine when a machine is likely to fail (and it touts cutting costs, increased energy efficiency and product quality improvement as among the benefits its platform offers) — but says the acquisition will allow it to develop its “innovative value stack”, by enabling new revenue models, cost reduction, and “increased effectiveness across industries”.

It also sees benefit in sitting under the established Munich Re umbrella — as a way to convince customers it will be a long-term business partner. It adds that it will continue to maintain its current focus on IoT for the industrial sector.