IoT Analytics Company mnubo Raises $6 Million Through White Star Capital and McRock

Montreal Internet of Things data analytics company mnubo has announced a $6 million Series A round of funding led by White Star Capital, with participation from dedicated Industrial IoT fund McRock Capital.

mnubo plans to expand its global commercial team and to accelerate the data science and machine learning aspects of its offering in order to improve the user experience. On the marketing front, mnubo plans to open a sales office in San Francisco.

ABI Research says that there are over 16 billion connected devices deployed right now and that that number is set to increase to 41 billion by 2020.

Similarly, Cisco predicts a 21-fold rise from the 179 petabytes in M2M IP traffic in 2013 to 3.7 exabytes by 2018.

White Star Capital, an early stage venture fund with offices in London, New York and Montreal, counts two Quebeckers, Éric Martineau-Fortin et Jean-François Marcoux, among its three founders.

While most attention with respect to the burgeoning Internet of Things market tends to fall on gadget makers, White Star focused on mnubo’s specialty of data analysis.

“We have met with many companies worldwide in the IoT space and developed a thesis that rather than back one gadget-maker we wanted to back the engine that could power them all,” said Marcoux. “We determined that the most value-added piece of the engine lies in data storage and real-time data analytics. The true value will come from the insights generated from the data gathered by those billions connected objects.”

White Star only announced the opening of a Montreal office in January, with the participation of the Quebec government to the tune of $10 million.

With customers in North America, Europe and Asia, mnubo has seen 400% growth since last year for its SmartObjects analytics service, which processes sensor data to provide predictive insights for applications and business processes.

Accordingly, mnubo could afford to be picky about which investor to work with.

“In 2012, mnubo was a precursor in Analytics built specifically for the IoT. Today, it has become clear to the entire industry that the real business value is about transforming raw sensor data into actionable insights,” said mnubo co-founder and CEO Frédéric Bastien. “We are extremely pleased to count White Star and McRock as strategic partners. With their vast experience in scaling software companies and their global networks, mnubo is ideally positioned to grab an impressive share of both the Consumer and Industrial IoT markets.”