California-based industrial AI developer Foghorn has closed $25 million in a series C round of funding, led by LS Corp, part of $25 billion South Korean industrial conglomerate LS Group. It said the new funds will accelerate growth among industrialists seeking digital change in East Asia, in particular.
Forte Ventures also joined the round, along with existing FogHorn investors, including Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, GE Ventures, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, March Capital Partners, and Darling Ventures.
FogHorn, which develops edge analytics software for industrial and commercial IoT, has raised $72.5 million in total, to date. In 2019, it achieved nearly 10-times growth in annual license bookings over the previous year, it claims, buoyed by demand for edge analytics in discrete and process manufacturing, oil and gas, transportation and smart buildings.
In 2019, FogHorn signed major “multi-million dollar, multi-year” enterprise licenses with industrial giants including Stanley Black & Decker and Honeywell. The latter is an investor in the firm via its venture capital division. It also reached “100 breakthrough IIoT use cases” in the year, it said.
FogHorn called 2019 a “banner year” for license bookings and new customer acquisitions. It said LS Corp came knocking before it had planned for another funding round.
David King, chief executive at FogHorn, commented: “This latest round of funding will accelerate our growth, especially in East Asia. The series C round, so broadly supported by our existing investor base, as well as our new collaboration with LS Corp, will extend FogHorn’s ability to scale and invest in continued product innovation as we deepen our portfolio of industry use cases.”
LS Group claims around $25 billion in global revenue. It has 100 subsidiaries in 25 countries. Holding company LS Corp comprises LS Cable & System, in the business of power and communications cables, LS Industrial Systems, handling electrical equipment and automation systems, LS Nikko Copper, a copper smelter and refiner, and LS Mtron, selling industrial machinery and components.
Yumi Lee, chief strategy officer of LS Corp, said: “FogHorn has pioneered edge analytics, machine learning, and recently edge AI since its inception. LS looks forward to supporting the company as it continues to enable edge AI deployments and digital transformation initiatives across global industries.”
He added: “Industrial IoT is at a tipping point. We’re seeing initiatives move quickly into full-scale deployments, especially among industries we serve in Korea and throughout the globe.”
FogHorn quoted recent forecasts from IDC that 41.6 billion connected IoT devices will be generating 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data in 2025, and from Gartner that 75 per cent of enterprise-generated data will be created or processed outside of a traditional centralized data center by 2025.
The company has also announced a number of new hires, including former Verizon and Ericsson exec John Neville, who joins as chief revenue officer, and Senthil Kumar, previously in charge of software engineering and analytics at Collective, who joins as vice president of engineering.
FogHorn has recently been recognized as a market leader in Frost & Sullivan’s roundup of emerging providers in the industrial IoT-AI platform market.
