After more than two years in development we have accomplished two major milestones in the last month. We have announced our first equity round of $3.5M, and we have introduced FoundriesFactory - a cloud service to help companies development secure, deploy and continually maintain products through their complete lifecycle - for IoT and Edge applications, accelerating time to market and reducing costs.
Two years ago a hand-picked team from Linaro Ltd started the Foundries journey. Our vision was to deliver a common software platform for IoT and Edge devices, to unify the fragmented market and enable companies to build secure products with lifetimes that could exceed a decade. A year ago we delivered the first build of the Linux microPlatform (LmP) at github/foundriesio, and we started working with early customers. The LmP is a cross-architecture, open source distribution, built with OpenEmbedded/Yocto, that is targeted at connected devices. It uses industry standard technologies to enable secure, incremental updates to be made over a product’s lifetime. Since then we have provided over 50 update releases, tracking the latest Linux security updates and new features for a wide range of different SoC hardware.
Today the LmP is used internally as the key building block for FoundriesFactory. The FoundriesFactory enables development, CI and testing, deployment and lifetime maintenance of secure software for embedded, IoT and Edge devices across the industry. It allows product developers to customize the LmP for their own hardware and use case, easily modify any part of the software stack, and add their own IP, while benefiting from lifetime updates to their products from a common maintained open source platform. All components of the end product software can be updated over the air - firmware, kernel, userspace and, optionally, container-based services and applications. A simple business model offers the benefits of FoundriesFactory for a monthly or annual subscription fee per project, with no per unit costs.
The recent funding led by Crane Venture Partners with participation from Backed VC enables us to grow the talented Foundries team and business, as we start to scale out supporting our partners and customers across the world. Our world class engineering team is distributed today across Europe and the US, and comprises experts from multiple fields including security, firmware, communications, kernel, open source distributions and scale out cloud services. We are attracting new talent to join us, and we will continue to build on our open and inclusive company culture, which extends to our relationships with our customer’s own engineering and business teams. We will also maintain our focus on delivering a universal software platform to help our customers deliver, deploy, and maintain secure connected devices with best in class support for industry standards and any public or private cloud infrastructure.
If you are building a product for IoT or Edge computing - whether it be a smart sensor, an industrial IoT product for manufacturing or for a smart city, a consumer device, a robot, a gateway or hub, a healthcare product, or indeed anything else connected to the Internet - our software can help you deliver a secure, maintained product with faster time to market and lower cost.