Greenwave Systems, a provider of Internet of Things (IoT) software and managed services -- and a developer of Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) FiOS Quantum Gateway -- has raised $60 million in new funding from investors.
Part of this funding round included raising $45 million in Series C financing in two phases. Leading the first phase was EDBI, the corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board. ST Telemedia (STT) invested in the second phase, which made up the majority portion of the entire Series C round.
A number of Greenwave's existing investors, including The Westly Group and E.ON (an international privately-owned energy supplier) also contributed to the new round. Nominees of EDBI and ST Telemedia have joined Greenwave Systems' Board of Directors.
An additional element of the funding includes a mezzanine facility of $15 million from BDCA (Business Development Corporation of America).
Greenwave plans to use the new funding to accelerate its global expansion plans, while providing growth capital for new strategic investments, including its AXON Platform. AXON is being used as a foundation for a series of next-generation IoT systems, router, video and wireless products. It plans to increase and diversify the pipeline of strategic accounts and expand into mobile infrastructure for M2M solutions.
"We have taken the additional capital to expand our team and use it to invest in more technology and potentially use it for small acquisitions where we are taking teams of 10, 15 and 20 people teams into the organization," said Martin Manniche, founder and CEO for Greenwave Systems, in an interview with FierceTelecom.
Manniche said that a big focus of this funding round was focused on attracting Asia-based investors so it could establish a greater foothold on those markets.
"We feel that we are starting to do well in the U.S. and the European market, but we needed a stronger footprint in Asia Pacific," Manniche said. "Singapore is very focused on having EDBI, which is sponsored by their government, but also having ST Telemedia as a partner is key for us for future growth."
The past year has been what Greenwave calls a profitable growth cycle. In addition to increasing its employee base to over 240 worldwide, the company opened a research and development center in Singapore and an office in San Jose, Calif., and added major new customers.
One of the most notable developments is that it strengthened its business relationship with Verizon, which is shipping the FiOS Quantum Gateway that Greenwave helped develop.
In November 2014, Verizon unveiled its Quantum Gateway with a promise of greater range of up to 325 feet within a home or business and the ability to support a larger number of devices such as tablet computers, smartphones and video devices. An additional benefit is the device also can potentially support the Zigbee home automation standard via a home area network (HAN) expansion port.
"We are building and sitting in the networking devices that touch Verizon's network," Manniche said. "On the broadband side, we're enabling the fiber infrastructure, the voice infrastructure, and you'll see some announcements for the managed services platform in 2016 for smart home services and enabling them to dliver faster broadband speeds and the distribution of wireless products on top of this router."
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