Smart home platform Plume raises a massive $270 million in new funding; now valued at $1.35 billion

Plume, a California-based tech startup and provider of SaaS platform for communications service providers that enables the delivery of services for connected homes, today announced it has closed a $270 million minority investment from global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners. This Series E round at a $1.35 billion valuation brings Plume’s total equity funding to $397 million.

Plume will use the funding to further increase investment in research & development and lean more aggressively into sales, marketing, and partnerships. The company will seek to continue its rapid product, revenue, customer, channel, and geographic expansion and plans to add employees in all of its offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Founded in 2015 by Adam Hotchkiss, Aman Singla, Fahri Diner, and Sri Nathan, Plume’s platform serves connected homes, delivering features like optimum Wi-Fi, parental controls, and motion sensing to smart home residents while giving communication service providers back-end applications to provide support. Plume is behind the smart home service offerings of more than 170 Communications Service Providers (CSPs) served to more than 22 million households across the globe.

Instead of attempting to improve only wireless coverage through distributed hardware, Plume’s approach is entirely different – a comprehensive suite of cloud-controlled front-end services delivered over a smart, software-defined network. Plume’s HomePass front-end services suite consists of adaptive and self-optimizing whole-home WiFi, AI-driven cybersecurity and IoT device protection, sophisticated parental supervision, secure access controls, and motion awareness.

“Growth in the smart home category is exploding, but the quality of consumer experience has fallen short,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Ryan Hinkle, who has been appointed as a director on Plume’s board. “We are convinced that Plume, with its scalable cloud data platform approach, highly efficient go-to-market strategy, strong momentum, top-quartile financial performance across all SaaS KPIs – including revenue, growth rates, gross margin, efficiency, and retention metrics – and the world-class team is transforming this category. We’re delighted to join and support this exciting journey.”

Customers benefit from Plume’s constantly expanding platform through OpenSync™, the most widely supported open-source, silicon-to-cloud framework for smart spaces. With OpenSync, CSPs can decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture. Managed by a massively scalable cloud control plane, new services can often be delivered without requiring new equipment, reducing CAPEX spend and extending the useful life of existing infrastructure. Since its creation in 2018, OpenSync has grown to power more than 26 million access points and switches across a broad range of silicon SDK and CPE platforms and has attracted many third-party developers and contributors.

“We could not be more enthusiastic about welcoming Ryan to our board, and our partnership with the entire Insight team,” said Fahri Diner, Co-founder and CEO of Plume. “By leveraging machine learning and AI, cloud data, open-source, deep ecosystem partnerships, and a scalable platform, we uniquely address the disconnect between the expectations of smart spaces and the service provider’s ability to deliver flawless experiences to them – while building a leading, high-growth SaaS business in a large, under-served market. An even stronger balance sheet through this cash infusion, coupled with our high operating leverage, sets the stage for Plume to continue to invest confidently in our future.”