The colony is abuzz as HiveMQ raises €40 million

Bavarian startup HiveMQ has raised €40 million in a Series A funding round. The HiveMQ solution helps facilitate communications between connected IoT devices; a lot of connected devices. The fresh honey will enable the company to press forward with further platform developments as it continues to scale. To date, HiveMQ has raised a total of €49.3 million, announcing their Series A almost a year to date since Seed.

According to an IDC report, within the next three years, approximately 40 billion IoT devices will be connected to the internet, each ready to send and receive data. Granted, these devices certainly aren’t sending each other lengthy emails with attachments, but data is data, and at 40 billion units, the figures escalate quickly.

To put things into perspective, estimates place the connected car generating around 2TB of data a day, with a connected factory pumping out 5 petabytes of data per week.

So with all this data flying around, amounts legacy enterprise messaging platforms were never designed to handle, both in terms of size or number of connections, who’s directing the traffic?

Herein lies HiveMQ’s value proposition. An early adopter of the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol, HiveMQ has been moving the IoT needle forward since 2012, and now counts a number of Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries amongst its client base. 

“We see strong cross-industry interest in our vision that an IoT messaging platform is required to implement a reliable and scalable IoT system. This investment will allow us to expand our go-to-market teams and accelerate our R&D in HiveMQ Cloud and the HiveMQ ecosystem,” commented HiveMQ CEO and co-founder Christian Götz.

HiveMQ’s €40 million Series A round was led by Molten Ventures and saw participation from new investors Mubadala Capital and Illusian, the family office of Supercell co-founder Ilkka Paananen, as well as follow on investments from Earlybird, Senovo, and New Forge.

“Global investment in IoT will grow substantially in the coming years, and we were impressed by HiveMQ’s vision and strategy to capitalise. The team at HiveMQ has built a product that revolutionises how companies connect with their customers and suppliers - something the IoT industry desperately needs,” commented Molten’s Christoph Hornung. “The opportunity for HiveMQ is to become the world's leading IoT messaging platform and we look forward to working with Christian and the team to help deliver their potential.”