DevicePilot secures £1.7 million funding for IoT Service Monitoring platform

Led by Beacon Capital, this latest funding brings the company’s total investment to more than £3 million, with other investors including Skyscanner founders Gareth Williams and Bonamy Grimes; Wendy White who is now VP at Google's X moonshot factory; and Alice Bentick and Matt Clifford, the founders of talent investor Entrepreneur First. 

“It is clear that connected devices have enormous potential to revolutionise businesses in almost every sector - but many have failed to deliver on their promise. DevicePilot can catalyse adoption of IoT by solving a problem that all connected device companies are experiencing” said Maria Dramalioti-Taylor, lead investor in this round and Managing Partner at Beacon Capital. “Every other sector of the digital economy has benefited from a plethora of customer experience tools. IoT companies have not to date had access to similar  enterprise-grade tools. DevicePilot has the potential to be this missing piece of the IoT technology stack.”

The funding will be used to expand DevicePilot’s Service Monitoring platform, used by businesses with large networks of connected devices to improve their service delivery, including EDF’s PodPoint. The product is gaining customers rapidly, especially in the Energy, Agri-tech and e-Mobility industries, sectors which are benefiting fastest from connected devices.

DevicePilot was founded by Pilgrim Beart, one of the creators of AlertMe – the smart thermostat company that became Centrica’s Hive™, which remains the UK’s most successful IoT rollout to date – along with Keith Reed and Rob Dobson from telco optimisation firm Actix. Drawing on Beart’s previous frustrations in deploying connected devices at scale, the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform ensures smart product companies can deliver a better service at a lower cost.

DevicePilot Service Monitoring enables connected product companies to grow profitably by solving three of their most-common problems: poor uptime, low service availability and escalating operational costs. By addressing these, DevicePilot helps protect revenue, save money and unlock growth. 

Companies already making use of DevicePilot Service Monitoring include POD Point – the electric vehicle charging company which achieves 4.7 out of 5 customer satisfaction and was recently bought by EDF; ChargedUp – the portable mobile phone charging points found in pubs and bars; and Dutch green energy giant Eneco.

Magnus Hultberg, Product Manager at customer Winnow Solutions, said “DevicePilot has helped us dramatically improve our customer response time while saving money in development time and system maintenance.”

Key features of the platform are:

• Connected device monitoring: DevicePilot offers continuous, real-time monitoring of the performance and availability of connected devices, whether that be a network of 1,000 or 100,000 devices. This includes a map of devices, analysis of uptime and usage as well as fault reporting, giving customers an unparalleled overview of their devices.
• Defining KPIs: the platform also gives customers a chance to define business critical KPIs that are specific to their needs. Whether that be setting targets for optimising uptime or ensuring efficient availability of devices at all times, DevicePilot can help to set these parameters, which are often key metrics when reporting to both internal stakeholders and customers.
• Rule notification: DevicePilot’s platform integrates with customers’ communication applications to create bespoke alerts in relation to any changes, faults, anomalies and trends. Whether drawing an engineer’s attention to faulty devices or alerting a member of the sales team to high levels of demand in a particular location, DevicePilot can automatically alert the relevant team when a condition is met.

“This funding helps take us to the next level. Every connected product company discovers an inflection point where it's impossible to continue delivering a good service to customers without complete, real-time oversight of their network. Service Monitoring solves this problem,” said Pilgrim Beart, cofounder and CEO of DevicePilot.

“The single most-important question any business needs to ask itself is: 'Is my device estate ready to deliver my business today?'" said DevicePilot co-founder and Head of Product Keith Reed. "As connected devices become more and more prevalent in businesses, Service Monitoring is emerging as a key, but often overlooked, requirement for industry growth.”