Just four and a half months after closing its $30 million Series B, DevOps startup Esper is back at it again with a new round of funding. This time, the Bellevue-based company is announcing its $60 million Series C raise, which was led by Insight Partners. Esper has now raised nearly $100 million in total funding since its inception.
This rapid influx of capital represents a growing trend in the IoT industry. Esper has created a tech platform that helps developers and engineers manage their fleet of Android-based devices, letting them build software, deploy that software across devices and maintain it via over-the-air updates.
This is important because a lot of companies rely on IoT devices that run Android (yes, the same Android OS built by Google that all non-iPhone smartphones run on). That includes all those point-of-sale terminals, connected exercise equipment, medical devices, smart kiosks and more. Companies that operate these machines need to have a way to monitor them and keep them functioning and secure with things like updates or IT support. Esper helps these companies do that.
Over 200 companies and a total of 2,000 developers use Esper. For example, there’s Ordermark, which has built a custom tablet that allows restaurant owners to manage their UberEats and Grubhub orders in one place. There’s Siyata Mobile, which has built a handset for emergency first responders. And there’s Spire Health, which uses its devices to monitor patients’ health. All of these companies rely on Esper to make sure their devices work at scale.
“With Esper, our remote patient monitoring service just works. Esper’s seamless deployment ensures that even patients who are not as comfortable with technology can successfully use our service,” Spire Health chief scientist and co-founder Neema Moraveji, Ph.D., said in a statement. “Device set-up is simple, there is zero configuration needed by the patients, and Esper’s full-service solution detects connectivity and sensor failures ahead of time and alerts the Spire team for proactive outreach to our patients, often before they even notice an issue.”
This new funding will allow Esper to “evangelize DevOps” and go after more customers. In a blog post, the company’s CEO and co-founder Yadhu Gopalan writes that the next step for the company is getting itself in front of more enterprise customers, in order to show the benefits of having a tool like theirs.
“Our biggest opportunity right now is getting the word out to more enterprises that Esper exists. Our customers tell us that we are completely resetting their assumptions about what is possible. It’s so rewarding to see the light bulb go off when a customer realizes all of the infrastructure they no longer have to build themselves,” Gopalan wrote.
Gopalan adds that the Esper product and team will grow from here. Esper has already quadrupled its employee headcount this year, and revenue growth is currently on target to be 4x higher than it was last year, according to TechCrunch. Esper is also currently hiring for over 20 Bellevue-based jobs in order to help prepare the company for its future goals.
