Maker of management platform for ‘internet of things’ gets $30 million infusion

by Paul Gillin, SiliconANGLE

FogHorn Systems Inc. continues to enlist an army of “internet of things” makers as investors in its campaign to build an IoT management platform.

The company is announcing today that it has raised a Series B funding round of $30 million led by Intel Capital Corp. with additional investments by Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures LLC and Honeywell Venture Capital LLC, the venture arm of the big control systems maker. That brings its total funding to $47.5 million.

FogHorn’s Complex Event Processing edge analytics software, which launched last year, enables customers to build and execute machine learning algorithms and other data science models on streaming sensor data at the source. The technology can be used to create “digital twins,” which are mirror images of physical machines that can be used for simulation and predictive analytics. The company recently introduced an edge machine learning platform that enables processing to be done at the point of collection rather than sent to a cloud or data center for processing.

“We had the luxury of picking and choosing from 25-plus investors who wanted to participate,” said FogHorn Chief Executive David King.

The company’s platform is designed to ingest data in real time and to perform analytics on streaming data in milliseconds. Users can apportion processing logic in the ways that make the most sense for the application, “from a Raspberry Pi up to a data center. You can can concentrate in a central location or push down to a box on the assembly line,” King said. “The architecture is built to run in a small footprint, but it scales up easily, so there’s no trade-off. It’s a matter of how the customer wants to federate the processing.”

The company said its entire software stack fits in about half the memory and storage of a Raspberry Pi, which is a small single-board computer that’s widely used in IoT applications.

FogHorn is General Electric Co.’s preferred edge analytics component for the next version of GE’s Predix industrial IoT platform, King said. FogHorn’s business plan is to sell licenses to large industrial enterprises as well as through systems integrators and bundling agreements with makers of edge devices. The company currently has bundling agreements with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Dell Technologies Inc., he said.

 

DCL: Seems Foghorn are doing exactly what we tried to do at ePatterns.com in 2001-2003. But in those days businesses were slow to understand the power and implications of CEP. We  talked to everyone who would listen. Finally we got the attention of a shipping company, American President Lines, that had a small research team based in Oakland, and were about to set up a beta contract with them. Transportation is an excellent example of where CEP can be leveraged to aid in improving operations. For APL the plan was to use our CEP as a basis for their automation of trip plans for container ships.  But our investors would not risk any further cash. So we went out of business. A case of being ahead of our time!