This article is more than 1 year old

Andreessen tips spare change into sensor startup Samsara

Along with World+Dog, Meraki founders reckon IoT is next big thing

The founders of Cisco-acquired Meraki have resurfaced with their next venture, an Internet of Things sensor outfit called Samsara.

Accompanied by the usual rapturous applause from the financial press, the outfit, set up by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket after they sent Meraki off to the Borg for US$1.2 billion, has funding from now-board-member Marc Andreessen.

It'll put the Series A $25 million into developing its wireless sensor platform. Biswas writes at Medium that “we believe that if we make it easy to deploy sensors and analyse data, that customers of all types will finally be able to install them by the thousands in places they’ve never been used before”.

The key differences El Reg can identify – since wireless sensors are a commodity – is that Samsara wants to make its stuff self-configuring, and wrap its hardware sales up with subscription to the cloudy data and analytics platforms.

Samsara is currently assembling its team of engineers – Biswas mentions “talent from MIT, Stanford, Google, Apple and Meraki” – and reckons it'll be shipping first product to early access customers in “a few weeks”.

Andreessen told Forbes the attraction is that the industrial sensor market lacks any 800-pound gorilla like Cisco: “So that playing field is wide open”.

That report also makes it clear that the big industrial sensor market is Samsara's target: “at a large scale, Samsara hopes to connect your sensors for about $100,000, one-tenth the typical contract cost”, it says.

Samsara's site is currently coy on the details of its product, merely saying it wants to combine “plug-and-play sensors, wireless connectivity, and rich cloud-hosted software, all tightly-integrated for simple deployment”.

In pimping the idea to the Wall Street Journal, Andreessen waxes lyrical about the idea of clouding all the luscious data that industrial systems keep to themselves: “What if you could systematically measure what’s going on in the real world and upload it to the cloud?”

Back to Forbes for more of the vision stuff: “Large systems like municipalities have assets like water tanks that are already checked by sensors, but they’re not hooked up to the Internet, Biswas says,” (without explaining why they should be).

“And at other companies like big grocery store chains, quality control can be transformed if a sensor is tracking each pallet of eggs automatically each step of the way” (which is currently the job of boring RFID tags connected to dull internal IT that doesn't offer any shot at a cloud computing coupon clip). ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like