Memfault Raises $8.5 Million in Series a Funding to Expand the First End-to-End Observability Platform for IoT Devices

Memfault’s OTA updates, proactive device monitoring, and automated fault debugging deliver efficiencies and savings across the entire connected device lifecycle

Memfault, the provider of the first cloud-based platform for connected device monitoring, updating, and debugging, announced it has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. Partech led the round, with participation from existing investor Uncork Capital. The Series A will allow Memfault to quickly scale its engineering team to meet accelerated demand from IoT device makers and make significant investments across product development and marketing.

“Memfault’s smart-device platform modernizes device monitoring, debugging, and deployment of updates, improving time-to-market and overall device health – all without impacting the end user,” said Jean Sini, General Partner at Partech. “The company’s growth over the past few years underscores the demand for a better, more cost-effective, and simpler method of managing device fleets at scale, and we’re excited to support Memfault’s vision.”

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“As an early investor in several hardware startups, we recognized that Memfault solved a problem no one else did by empowering developers to get ahead of potential issues, leading to faster production, better products, and happier end-users,” said Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of Uncork Capital. “With the executive team’s deep domain experience in hardware development, Memfault’s diagnostic tools completely transform traditional hardware practices that can’t match the pace of the smart device industry. We’ve been thrilled to watch the success of Memfault as it extends its reach in response to the exponential growth of connected devices across all market sectors.”

Memfault launched in 2018 with a founding team of embedded engineers from Pebble, Fitbit, and Oculus to solve the slow, inefficient, costly, and reactive processes that continued to plague firmware engineering teams. This passive process effectively relied on customers to be product testers as the first indication of a device issue often came through unhappy users contacting customer service or voicing dissatisfaction more publicly through social media and product review channels. With 30 billion IoT devices predicted to be in use by 2025, traditional hardware monitoring and debugging methods can not keep pace with the increase of smart device adoption and the complexity of connectivity blocking teams from scaling their fleet of devices.

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Memfault’s cloud-based firmware observability platform dramatically reduces engineering and support overhead by enabling teams to deploy OTA firmware updates, automatically capture and remotely debug issues, and continuously monitor fleets of connected devices at scale. Memfault’s SDK can be deployed on any connected device to capture data and send it to the cloud for analysis. Memfault’s backend identifies, classifies, and deduplicates error reports, so engineers know what issues are most prevalent, and where the issue occurs without requiring any action from end-users.

Key Features of Memfault

By integrating Memfault into smart device infrastructure, developer teams can monitor and manage the entire device lifecycle, from development to feature updates, with ease and speed.

Key features include:

• Remote debugging: By aggregating issues across software releases and hardware revisions, Memfault can determine which devices are impacted and what stack they’re running, and teams can inspect backtraces, variables, and registers when encountering an error.
• Firmware OTA updates: Teams can deliver updates to specific devices at specific times. By controlling the timing of firmware updates, teams can schedule updates when users are least impacted. Devices can also be split into cohorts for targeted updates, and rollouts can be released in stages to limit fleet-wide issues from new updated versions.
• Device monitoring: Memfault offers real-time reports on device check-ins and notifications of unexpected inactivity. Teams can view device and fleet health data like battery life, connectivity state, and memory usage or track how many devices have installed a release, and how many have run into issues all from a single console.

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“At Latch, we are always looking to make our Access product simpler, faster and more reliable,” said Raman Thaper, director of engineering at Latch. “Our latest keyless product demanded that we raise the bar on these fronts to new heights. Memfault gives us the hard data to be confident in the reliability of our firmware and proactively take action, resolving issues before our users are impacted. These real-time device-level metrics and alerts have streamlined engineering processes and improved the overall health of our devices immensely.”

“In 2020, Diamond Kinetics launched a new generation of our product and built Memfault in from the beginning,” said Mike Ressler, CTO at Diamond Kinetics. “Because of the monitoring and automatic data collection capabilities that Memfault gave us, we were able to go to market faster with more confidence in the success of our launch. With our new product on the market, we can now service and address issues without needing to “psychic debug” sensors in the wild based on customer reports – we have the stack traces. All this on an embedded sensor with limited resources over a Bluetooth connection to a mobile app. Every step of the way, the Memfault SDK has been reliable and easy to integrate. I wouldn’t go to market on an IoT device without Memfault in place.”

“Despite the ubiquity of connected devices, hardware teams are too often bound by a lack of visibility into device health and a reactive cycle of waiting to be notified of potential issues,” said François Baldassari, CEO of Memfault. “Memfault has reimagined hardware diagnostics to instead operate with the similar flexibility, speed, and innovation that has proven so successful with software development. Memfault has saved our customers millions of dollars and engineering hours, and empowered teams to approach product development with the confidence that they can ship better products, faster, with the knowledge they can fix bugs, patch, and update without ever disrupting the user experience. This funding round allows us to grow our teams and build out our platform to meet the significant growth in demand for our scalable, simple solution.”

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