MODE Raises $3 Million in Series A Funding Led by True Ventures

By AIT News Desk On Sep 26, 2018

MODE enables businesses to better understand their operations and reap the benefits of AI applications

Silicon Valley startup MODE today announced it has raised $3 millionin Series A funding led by True Ventures. MODE collects data from the physical world to help businesses understand, automate and make smarter decisions. Including its Series A, MODE has raised $5 million total.

The ability to harness operation data has become critical for businesses looking to stay competitive in areas including factory automation, automotive technologies, and bio-medical sciences. Yet, many companies have difficulties scaling their Internet-of-Things systems from proof-of-concept to commercial-scale deployment.

MODE specializes in moving sensor data from the physical world to the cloud. Specifically, the MODE solution helps businesses efficiently get data from their sensors to their preferred business applications, enabling operational improvements and valuable insights. The MODE solution rivals typical IoT platform solutions, which can be complex and require considerable custom software development to use. Its unique sensor gateway and specialized time-series data storage in the cloud also make it possible to operate at scale.

“Data collection from the physical world is the first step in implementing automation, big data analytics and artificial intelligence,” said MODE Co-Founder and CEO Gaku Ueda. “We focus on data collection because we want to address common infrastructure challenges and let customers spend their time utilizing data for their businesses.”

Gaku Ueda, formerly a member of the early Google Maps team and a director of engineering at Twitter, co-founded the company with Ethan Kan. Prior to MODE, Kan was a developer at Yahoo and director of engineering at social gaming company 50Cubes. Their experience in building large-scale cloud infrastructure empowered them to found MODE and offer scalable sensor data storage services in the cloud to businesses.

“Sensors are and will increasingly become a source of data and data-derived intelligence that will help improve and automate many industrial processes,” said Om Malik, partner at True Ventures. “Mode has developed software technologies to harness this power and transform the industrial world.”