Filament, a US-based provider of wireless industrial networks, has received $15 million in a new venture financing round led by Verizon Venture and Bullpen Capital, bringing its total funding to $21.8m.
Aside from Verizon and Bullpen, the new list of investors in the funding round included: Intel Capital, JetBlue Technology Ventures, CME Ventures, Flex technology accelerator program Lab IX, Backstage Capital, and Tappan Hill Ventures. Previous investors such as Samsung NEXT, Resonant Venture Partners, and Digital Currency Group also participated in the new round.
Filament will utilise proceeds from the round to scale hardware manufacturing; enhancing its platform with pinpoint GPS functionality, enabling a new generation of wide-area asset management solutions; grow the platform’s smart contract capabilities, jumpstarting new revenue opportunities for industrial customers; and building out a wider ecosystem of delivery partners, including large technology integrators, value-added resellers, and global industrial conglomerates.
Filament’s patented network solution allows industrial assets to securely communicate with one another wirelessly, independent of cloud connectivity or any other third-party data platform. The solution is designed to deliver edge processing in environments where cellular connectivity and Wi-Fi are unreliable and unavailable.
Filament’s open technology stack leverages the most advanced communication and security methods available today, and challenges the status quo of entirely cloud-based architectures. The result is a secure foundation for decentralised interaction and exchange. Devices on the Filament platform can discover, communicate, and interact with each other in a fully autonomous and distributed manner.
Bonny Simi, president of JetBlue Technology Ventures, said: “The future of fully-enabled secure machine-to-machine communication in hard-to-connect operational environments like airfields and construction sites is becoming a reality and we want to explore that future with Filament. We continue to back innovators that will transform the travel experience, and Filament’s technology has the potential to unlock a new world of smarter, more efficient operations for airlines and beyond.”