Adopting Internet of Things (IoT) technology for the office is not easy – especially at the enterprise level. Companies are concerned with IoT device management, as well as building the infrastructure necessary to keep those devices connected and functioning.
To make it easier, five former colleagues – Pasi Leipala, Teemu Vatovaara, Jirki Okkonen, Vile Ilsjärvi and Toni Leinonen – founded Haltia, a startup that provides mobile gateways, device management dashboards and software to help companies integrate. IoT in the workplace.
Demonstrating that investors are interested in its idea, Haltian recently participated in a €22 million (~$24 million) round of funding led by Mandum Asset Management Growth Equity, along with Varma, Tessi, Ventic and Inventure. Haltian CEO Leipala said the company’s overall funding will be used to support Haltian’s recruiting efforts in Central Europe and North America.
Kitty Lain, investment manager at Mandatum Asset Management, said in an email: “We were drawn to Haltian because of their ability to digitize the built environment and provide their clients with previously unavailable information. Their cloud-connected smart sensors and high-level R&D have received great feedback from aspiring US customers, and we’re excited to see how Haltian’s products are loved in international markets.
The IoT market is resilient to the ups and downs of the broader technology space, according to data from Crunchbase, with the average amount of capital raised by IoT startups in 2022 reaching the highest level in more than a decade.
Interestingly, Haltian isn’t the only startup vying for a bigger slice of the VC pie. Recently, a startup called Memfault raised $24 million for a platform designed to help companies manage their growing IoT device fleets. Elsewhere, Fleet received tens of millions of dollars for its device management software. There’s Esper, which landed $30 million in May 2021 to grow its IoT devOps platform.
What sets Haltian apart, says Leipala – the CEO – is the smoothness of its product offering. Leipala and Haltian’s other co-founders previously worked at Nokia in one of the company’s smartphone divisions, where the seed of Haltian’s idea came from.
“Haltian initially focused on providing premium engineering services to other companies. With revenue from engineering services, our own IoT products started to develop after two years,” Leipala told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Haltian is one of the few companies that can offer a complete IoT solution. We can customize anything. . . Material according to customer requirements.
Through a combination of sensors and AI algorithms, the Haltian platform can count the number of people in an office or building, or monitor things like CO2 and humidity levels. It can also detect light usage, drying and soaking temperatures, and when paper, towel and soap dispensers are running low.
Haltia is collecting a lot of sensitive information. But Laipala insists that it is anonymized and stored in a private cloud. (If there isn’t a glance at the customer service agreement, we’ll have to take his word for it.)
“For Haltian, scalability is not only about how many devices can connect to a single gateway, but also about how thousands of fulfillment locations can be served logistically, as well as how easy and fast installation, onboarding and life cycle management can be,” he said. Added.
Working in Haltian’s favor is the growing interest in IoT among the enterprise. In a 2021 survey by London-based consultancy Omdia, 90% of organizations either saw IoT as a core part of their digital transformation plans or said it would be deployed in various areas of their organization. A separate report by Gartner, published a year ago, estimated that 47% of organizations plan to increase their investment in IoT, with the aim of reducing costs and strengthening their overall digital transformation efforts.
Interestingly, 75% of Haltian’s revenue comes from sales of its IoT devices, says Laipala.
“For the past three years, we have grown at a rate of nearly 50% annually, reaching 20 million euros (~$21.85 million) in revenue,” Leipala said. “Since the pandemic, there has been a focus on supporting technologies – for example, IoT solutions – to create office designs that are aligned with company cultures. At the same time, IoT sensor solutions have become more affordable, cost-effective and easy to implement.
Riding the upward trend, Haltian recently expanded into the US and Amsterdam, opening offices in California and Holland. The company, which has raised a total of 40 million euros (~43.71 million dollars) so far, plans to increase its workforce from 145 people to around 170 by the end of the year.
