Esper Announces Series B funding to fuel Device DevOps Innovation | Esper Blog
Today, we’re excited to announce our $30 million Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, and Haystack. This brings Esper’s total funding to $40.6 million.
Digital transformation is accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices across industries
With the volume of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices projected to increase from 14 billion in 2021 to 31 billion in 2025, companies are learning how best to scale their core business applications to take advantage of this new environment. But with thousands of device manufacturers on Android alone, achieving scale brings significant challenges.
Esper’s platform helps companies bypass building a traditional internal DevOps team by enabling developers and engineers to securely streamline deployment and management for distributed fleets of Android edge devices, creating positive user experiences that can rapidly scale.
The pandemic has transformed industries like connected fitness, digital health, hospitality, and food delivery, further accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices. But with each new use case, better software automation is required.
Esper’s mature cloud infrastructure incorporates the functionality cloud developers have come to expect, re-imagined for devices.
We’ve earned the trust of customers
In 2020 we saw significant customer growth, with major brands across a number of industries, including CloudKitchens, Spire Health, Intelity, Ordermark, Inspire Fitness, RomTech, and Uber turning to Esper to bring them to market faster as the demand for seamless digital experiences spiked.
Esper provides a mature cloud infrastructure so developers and engineers can securely streamline deployment and management for distributed fleets of mission-critical Android edge devices, creating delightful user experiences that rapidly scale.
For 20 years we have been enabling devices one-off – the time is right to democratize device DevOps
Just as AWS rapidly accelerated the time to bring a web application to market, Esper gives developers and engineers the platform to bring their dedicated devices and associated apps to market exponentially faster. Regardless of your hardware choices or roadmap, Esper presents the infrastructure as a single pane of glass.
We innovate for you on the infrastructure level, so you can innovate at the application level.
I’ve had a frontrow seat to the DevOps revolution from my time leading development of Windows mobile devices at Microsoft and designing back-end solutions for Amazon’s FireOS and AWS cloud services, and leading systems engineering for Amazon Go. Over time, I saw an opportunity to bring the “DevOps mindset” to the world of intelligent edge devices.
Seeing firsthand how much of a critical role modern infrastructure played in the success of cloud services, I wanted to apply similar tools and concepts to power the connected future for Android devices. That idea is at the core of what Esper is doing: achieve the maturity I built at Microsoft and Amazon for all companies who want to scale device fleets. Shiv Sundar shared this vision and brought extensive Android ecosystem experience from his time at Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei and Cyanogen, so together we founded Esper in 2018.
Esper found product-market fit in 2020 and now it’s time to grow our team
At year-end, the number of devices running on Esper grew 15x, with 70x year-over-year revenue growth. With the new funding, we plan to continue to build out our product portfolio and expand our infrastructure platform to support even larger workloads. Additionally, we plan to expand our team and be hiring for engineering in cloud, Android, and full-stack; product and program management, user experience, marketing, and sales.
We also welcome Andy Vitus to our Board and look forward to partnering with him in our next phase of growth. “The world of edge devices is growing daily – from the ubiquitous tablets in retail, restaurants and warehouses, to fitness equipment and kiosks. All these devices need provisioning, scaled deployments, and frequent and remote updates,” said Andy Vitus, partner at Scale Venture Partners. “Esper is the DevOps infrastructure for the millions of fleets of devices out there in the hands of non-IT users – consumers, restaurant workers, shoppers, and more. We led their Series B because we see parallels with other highly successful DevOps companies and Esper has already established themselves as the leader in the burgeoning need for device DevOps.”