Monitoring a space is about a lot more than security cameras. Awair is trying to help businesses and consumers more deeply understand the environments in which they live and work.
Awair has raised a $10 million Series B led by The Westly Group with participation from iRobot, Altos Ventures, Emerson Electric and Nuovo Capital. The company has raised more than $21 million to date.
The company has been plugging along with air-quality monitors that look like they belong in the MoMa. Awair’s $199 monitor senses things like particulate matter, temperature, humidity, and CO² levels. They’ve built out their product line with a couple other devices, but they’re largely targeting air-conscious consumers that might have allergies of another ailments and “design moms” who are looking to get some well-designed tech into their home.
The information all plugs into an app that helps consumers understand what’s happening in their home and get tips for how they can improve air quality.
As the company looks to make venture-worthy returns, it’s been scaling beyond the consumer IoT space into the world of enterprise IoT with its Omni product that Await has been selling to large real estate firms, offices and hospitals, aiming to give companies more insight into what life is like in every corner of their physical spaces.
The devices measure the same things their consumer products do, but also can track ambient light and noise in space, and pipe all of that data into a dashboard that can help businesses automate how they push their existing building infrastructure like their HVAC systems to respond to changes in the environment.
While Awair has been selling consumer IoT devices since 2015, its business product is about 18 months old, and a big part of this fundraise is to bring a sales staff onboard to keep the pace of enterprise expansion, which has been faster growing than the consumer business.
The company says they have more than 300 enterprise customers on the platform, including WeWork, Airbnb, Harvard and The Crown Estate.