The funds will be used to expand the firm’s ecosystem of partners and providers
Ayla Networks, a provider of internet of things (IoT) platform-as-a-service (PaaS), has raised $60 million in Series D financing led by Hong Kong-based Run Liang Tai Fund (RLT) and Chinese firm Sunsea Telecommunications.
The IoT specialist said that the funding will be used to further expand Ayla’s product capabilities to help large enterprises extract IoT data and transform it into business intelligence, and to expand its ecosystem network of partners and application providers.
“Ayla has amassed more than 100 large enterprise customers by solving their challenges regarding how to securely connect, manage and apply intelligence to all of their connected devices and sensors,” said David Friedman, Ayla CEO and co-founder. “The Ayla platform blends critical capabilities related to security, privacy, data policy and management with a massively configurable capability for our customers to ingest data from any sensor and IoT cloud. The platform makes it easier for enterprises to apply intelligence and analytics to broad sets of heterogeneous data sets to transform the data into real business value.”
As part of the funding round, Ayla is partnering with Sunsea Telecommunications, a public company serving the Chinese telecommunications market, to expand the firm’s presence in the Chinese IoT market. Ayla and Sunsea IoT, a subsidiary of Sunsea Telecommunications are forming a joint venture, named Ayla Sunsea, that will sell and deliver Ayla’s offerings to customers with headquarters in China.
“Ayla has won some of China’s largest manufacturers, especially in the home appliance and air conditioning segments,” said Phillip Chang, Ayla co-founder and general manager of Ayla China. “The partnership with Sunsea will make available far more resources to support our customers, and Sunsea’s China market knowledge and relationships will allow us to expand much faster in the large telco and enterprise opportunities inside China.”
Founded in 2010, Ayla’s IoT platform connects devices, clouds and applications to provide connectivity, data analytics and helps manufactures to turn their products into smart connected systems. The company had initially focused on markets such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), large and small appliances, water management and home control. More recently, the company has expanded into serving large retail, industrial, telco and service provider, and medical markets.
