• Relayr

  Led · Series B · Nov 2016

  relayr delivers a protocol-agnostic IoT middleware platform, device management and data analytics capabilities alongside agile professional services used by hundreds of companies worldwide. The company uses artificial intelligence to identify business-relevant processes and offers applications such as predictive maintenance and digital twins. Led by CEO Josef Brunner, relayr combines technology and services to support digital transformation initiatives. The company said it will focus on business topics including financing and insurance of digital transformation projects. In February 2018 relayr raised approximately US$30m to further expand its core tech activities and to grow in AI-driven Industry 4.0 connectivity. The capital is intended to support continued product and market expansion. relayr provides an end-to-end industrial IoT solution that includes a cloud platform (Any-to-Any), open-source software development kits, consulting services, and industrial-grade sensor kits for rapid prototyping. The company targets manufacturing, infrastructure management and retailing. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Boston, relayr has offices in Silicon Valley, Germany and the UK and is a roughly 100-person firm. relayr has moved beyond pure technology sales toward broader IoT-based business-model offerings and is partnering with HSB (part of Munich Re) to craft customized, IoT-enabled industrial insurance products. HSB became a customer prior to the partnership and will use relayr data to inform underwriting for the industry’s first industrial IoT-specific insurance offerings. The company recently secured a $23 million financing round tied to this strategic collaboration. relayr provides an end-to-end Internet-of-Things development solution that includes an IoT-Cloud platform, a software development kit and a sensor kit with freely programmable sensors, metering and transmission modules. The company was founded in 2013 by Harald Zapp (COO) and is based in Berlin. Customers include Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte, Cisco and the City of Paris. relayr raised $11M in a Series A financing round. It intends to use the capital to advance and expand its platform into the US market. Backers on the round included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Munich Venture Partners, with participation from Tom Noonan and relayr’s CEO Josef Brunner. relayr’s core product is the WunderBar, a plug-and-play IoT hardware development kit sold with SDKs and an API to lower the barrier for software developers building connected-device apps. The company is also developing the OpenSensor Cloud (OSC), a hardware-agnostic cloud services platform for device and data management, visualization, and app integration; OSC is initially free for developers with plans to monetize by charging for data volumes. relayr plans a ‘smart apps’ marketplace to enable discovery and potential app-store style monetization in future. The startup has shipped WunderBar kits and reported selling around 600 kits to date, with roughly 282 crowdfunder backers (325 boards) plus about 300 pre-orders and distribution via Conrad. It operates a roughly 20-person tech and community team, has over 500 app-developer mailing-list signups and 120 developer-dashboard signups, and prices the WunderBar at $199/€145. relayr intends to expand its U.S. presence while keeping and relocating to a larger HQ in Berlin to support planned hires. relayr’s core product is the WunderBar, a modular, chocolate-bar‑style hardware starter kit that lets app developers snap off and wirelessly access sensor modules via Bluetooth Low Energy and upload data over Wi‑Fi to relayr’s cloud platform. The kit includes a main module with an ARM microprocessor and Wi‑Fi chip, six “smart modules” (temperature, proximity, light, colour, humidity, movement) plus an IR transmitter module; two module slots will be decided by a crowdfunding vote. relayr supplies SDKs, an API, libraries and tutorials to help developers integrate the hardware with Android, iOS and Node.js apps. The company plans to open source PCB layouts and firmware to encourage hardware developers to adopt and extend its designs. Pricing for the WunderBar started at $119 for early backers on Dragon Innovation (now $149+), with estimated shipping in May. relayr is based at the StartupBootcamp accelerator and was founded in January last year; it has raised €250,000 in a friend‑and‑family round and is closing an additional €500,000 from undisclosed tech investors while running the crowdfunding campaign.

No current team members are available.