IoT in the Home: Funding

Smart home startups took $454 million in investor funding in 2014, an increase of 57% over 2013[1]. Among the largest deals in the space over the past six months include a $38MM Series B from Bessemer Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures to August (smart locks) and a $31.8 million Series B to connected home software platform Zonoff from investors including Grotech Ventures and Valhalla Partners.

The home automation market is an active field for M&As as the boundaries between different ecosystems are blurred in the drive to capture market share with large companies placing early bets through acquisitions. Moreover, some of the lesser known companies have matured their businesses with Control4 and Alarm.com completing successful IPOs in the past two years, in 2013 and 2015, respectively. While both companies took over 10 years to achieve this, these durables goods companies are showing that there is still a massive opportunity to convert consumers.

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* This is the fourth part of a multipart article. This is a link for the full article.

[1] CB Insights, “Disrupting Honeywell: The Startups Unbundling Honeywell in the Smart Home,” April 2015.