Cloudleaf, an industrial IoT company providing sensors, gateways and cloud technologies raised a $13M Series A round. Seasoned investors like IndusAge Partners, Bold Capital Partners, Tandem Capital, and Mahindra Partners participated in the funding round.
The company was founded in 2014 with an undisclosed amount of seed capital. It markets its technology under the brand name of ‘Cloudleaf Sensor Fabric’. The fabric is just a mesh of location-aware sensors, end-points, gateways, and cloud-based platform for data analysis.
The Cloudleaf sensors and end-points collect location and contextual data and send it to the cloud platform. The cloud-based services of the platform let users access real-time metrics, historical trends, KPIs, and rule-based alerts.
The startup boasts having big-name customers such as Tesla Motors, Chevron, Mahindra, and McKinsey & Company. A key reason of Cloudleaf attracting customers across different verticals is that its sensor and end-point-based technology coupled with cloud-based analytics engine can be deployed in rugged environments as well.
As for use cases, the ‘Cloudlead Sensor Fabric’ can be used for asset utilization, factory floor operations, and condition monitoring of critical ‘things’. A close look at the company’s patents reveals that it holds one titled “Systems, methods, and devices for asset status determination”. The sensor devices collect data via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication signals from the leaf node device to the middleware and then on to the cloud-platform.
As the enterprise IoT gets heated, new companies have launched end-to-end platforms. The approach addresses a key problem of fragmentation between vendors and various systems. Particle, another full-stack IoT device platform banked $20M Series B in July this year. It also offers a cloud-based platform, device management console, cellular IoT SIMs, and asset tracking devices.
