Industrial IoT Leaders Invest $30 Million in FogHorn

FogHorn Systems announced the completion of a series B round of funding totaling $30 million. The funding will support the company’s work in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) edge computing market, including analytics and machine learning.

Intel Capital and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures led the round, with new investor Honeywell Ventures and all previous investors participating, including Series A investors March Capital Partners, GE Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Darling Ventures and seed investor The Hive.

Turning data into insights

“Both the promise and challenge of IIoT lie in the ability to convert sensor data to actionable insights that improve customers’ operating efficiency and generate new sources of business value,” said Jonathan Ballon, vice president and general manager of Intel’s IoT Group. “As we’ve watched FogHorn’s progress with both leading IIoT solutions providers and major industrial end customers, we believe their edge analytics and machine learning technology will be a critical factor in enabling those operating efficiencies and delivering that business value.”

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FogHorn recently introduced Lightning ML, touted as the world’s first edge machine learning solution. It’s built on the company’s CEP (complex event processing) edge analytics software. The company says it gives industrial customers the tools they need to train and execute machine learning algorithms and other advanced data science models on streaming sensor data right at the source.

Delivering real-time analytics and machine learning value

“For the oil and gas industry, harnessing IIoT insights will produce significant operating savings and spur major process improvements,” said Cory Steffek, managing director North America of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV). “We believe innovators like FogHorn will lead the way in redefining IIoT edge computing to deliver real-time analytics and machine learning value across our entire business — upstream, midstream and downstream.”

[ Related: Why the Industrial IoT Needs an Open-Source Edge Platform ]

With more than 20 billion IoT-connected devices expected by 2020, according to Gartner’s latest projections, FogHorn investor GE estimates that the industrial Internet market segment will grow to $225 billion in that timeframe. That presents a fundamental computing challenge — how to generate insights from all data being generated without transport costs, security risks or operational latency.