Foundries.io, a UK-based IoT tech startup, snags $8M Series A funding to secure the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) or connected world finally makes it possible to connect home appliances, industrial machines, building automation, and smart energy grids to the Internet. But securing these connected devices has been a challenge.

According to research firm Markets and Markets, the global IoT security market is expected to grow from $12.5 billion in 2020 to $36.6 billion by 2025. COVID-19 and the shift to working from home (WFH) have dramatically increased the number of remotely connected devices, accelerating the demand for securing connected products. One of the new entrants in this space is Foundries.io, a Cambridge, England-based IoT startup in cloud development and deployment solutions for secure IoT and Edge devices.

Today, Foundries announced it has raised $8 million in Series A funding to support the company’s aggressive expansion plans through both talent recruitment and marketing, to bring this platform to further innovative companies around the world. The round was led by IQ Capital, with participation from Crane Venture Partners and Backed VC. Foundries.io has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2017.

Founded in 2017 by Ian Drew and Tyler Baker, Foundries.io delivers secure, over-the-air updatable software platforms for embedded product development. The startup also provides software platforms with lifetime support for building and maintaining connected devices.

Foundries.io is one of the many startups in this growing IoT security space. Another startup is a Tel Aviv, Israel-based Vdoo. We covered the startup early this year. Vdoo provides everything companies need to secure their connected products, including security analysis, gap resolution, validated compliance, embedded protection, and operations monitoring.

Unlike Vdoo, however, Foundries.io has developed a transformative, open-source platform that provides OEMs and Systems Integrators a common software base to develop, test, deploy, manage and maintain secure IoT and Edge devices through a single cloud-native solution.

“The industry needs a new cloud DevOps approach to IoT that’s built from the ground up to reinvent how software is developed and deployed. At Foundries.io, our team’s deep expertise and experience has helped us to reinvent how devices are secured and managed. We believe the latest software is always the most secure and most trusted, so we have created the FoundriesFactory platform to deliver to the embedded industry an easy-to-use cloud-native solution for secure open source-based software development and management,” said George Grey, CEO of Foundries.io. “OEMs can now couple their hardware innovations to a secure, production-tested base software platform, enabling freedom of choice of enterprise software and cloud providers using containerized applications and services.”

“Foundries.io is leading an industry-wide movement to secure any software running on connected edge devices. The company has created the first truly horizontal, cloud-native, hardware-agnostic operating system and device management platform, enabling OEMs to focus on their applications and services, while being secure in the knowledge that their devices in the field are always kept safe, by using up-to-date software that is fully optimized to their own hardware designs,” said Ed Stacey, Managing Partner at IQ Capital. “Device security is currently a major bottleneck to full IoT adoption – and is likely to remain so while embedded engineering talent continues to be in short supply. With a growing list of global Tier-1 customer advocates, and influential open-source developers supporting its platform, Foundries.io is set to transform the way that Edge devices are designed, delivered, and managed.”

“The IoT industry is ripe for a horizontal platform that allows OEMs to own their data and security strategies, without being locked-in. Governments are setting security standards around the world for consumers and enterprise devices that will need to be met. The market is tripling in the next decade for IoT devices and so we are ready for this inflection point,” said Ian Drew, Chairman of Foundries.io.