Seebo, the Tel Aviv, Israel-founded startup that offers an Internet of Things (IoT) end-to-end platform to help companies launch smart products faster, has closed $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round, which was led by Carmel Ventures with participation from existing investors, including TPY Capital, brings the total raised by the company to $14 million.
“Most product companies, outside the big ones, don’t want/can’t afford the headache, expense and commitment of building IoT capabilities from scratch,” a spokesperson for Seebo tells me. “Seebo’s platform is aimed at helping these companies build and support connected products. You can almost think of it as outsourced IoT development.”
That “outsourced IoT development” refers to the fact that Seebo offers an end-to-end solution with software that supports the design and prototyping of IoT devices (pre-production), manufacturing, and keeping those devices connected/up and running once they are launched.
The startup has 18 patents filed related to its offering, and Seebo’s co-founder and CEO Lior Akavia tells me that the platform employs drag ‘n’ drop functionality for many stages of the development process, meaning that a company launching an IoT product doesn’t need to have a whole team of software and hardware specialists.
More specifically, he says the Seebo platform includes a hardware/firmware simulator and SDKs for building supporting mobile apps, along with software to help at the design and prototyping stage that will drill down into component choices based on a company’s design priority e.g. functionality versus cost.
“Seebo simplifies the process of making a product smart and allows product companies to leverage their current team so that they don’t need to hire a single new person and can still develop, produce and launch amazing IoT products,” says the company. “Seebo works with product teams that have never developed anything electronic before and also those with many in-house engineers.”
To that end, Seebo’s typical clients — which it is hesitant to name for competitive reasons — include companies in the industries of toy and children’s products, health and wellness, sports equipment, furniture and electronics, travel equipment, baby products and fashion.
“Typically they have annual turnover greater than $50 million, but we also have clients that are Kickstarter campaigns, and many that have market cap of greater than $1 billion,” says the company.