Swedish Industrial IoT startup Crosser Technologies AB announced a new financing round end April 2019. A look at the company, its solutions, the A-round and Crosser’s expansion plans and strategy.
Crosser Technologies, a startup that’s active in Industrial IoT with software solutions for edge computing, fog computing and real-time integration, has raised €3 million. One of the main goals of the startup’s new financing round is international expansion.
The first country the company wants to expand into: Germany. The country of Industry 4.0 already has a quite impressive industrial IoT ecosystem(startups, major industrial players and others).
Alex Meyer, Partner at investor 42CAP (more below) states that “besides from being one of the largest markets in the world, Germany has also taken the lead in digitalization of manufacturing through the concept of Industry 4.0″. In his view Crosser is “extremely well positioned to become a key solution provider in Germany but also globally.”
Despite Europe currently being ahead in Industrial IoT implementations and Germany taking center stage in the European market there is still quite some work regarding IIoT and industrial transformation overall. And the German industrial market is indeed large so Germany is the – for Crosser Technologies and its investors – obvious place to start. We should add that not even that long ago in Germany questions have been raised about the digital innovation capacities and challenges the country has.
Analytics and machine learning in the edge
Crosser Technologies clearly is an innovator and it will be interesting to see the (new) strategic partnerships that undoubtedly will follow in Germany.
As a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in edge computing – with an open ecosystem approach for machine learning algorithms in the edge – Crosser doesn’t just want to expand into Germany (and later in other countries) and build the inevitable partner ecosystem one requires to succeed in the market.
The Swedish company also wants to invest further in its solutions where simplicity and user-friendliness are important keywords.
The Crosser platform for streaming data analytics, integration and automation (for any edge, on-premise or cloud) consists of Crosser Cloud for design and orchestration and Crosser Node, the real-time engine.
Crosser Flow Studio is the drag-and-drop visual design tool in Crosser Cloud that focuses on usability and low life-cycle costs, using modules (and not requiring developers).
Crosser earlier secured €1.4 million in seed funding, led by Spintop Ventures with Almi Invest and Norrlandsfonden as co-investors in the round. In the 2019 A-round they are joined by investors German 42CAP (for the – former – marketing people that might read this: founded by people behind eCircle, which was acquired by Teradata) and Swedish Industrifonden (a Stockholm-based VC with a portfolio across the Nordics).
In the announcement of the A-round Crosser points to what it calls its “Bring your own AI” strategy. Crosser CEO and co-founder Martin Thunman on that strategy: “We don ́t believe there is one ML (machine learning) framework that is better than others, it depends on the situation, the use case and the specific customer skill-sets. We also believe this is a fast-evolving technology where new frameworks will gain popularity in the future… the ‘Bring your own AI’ strategy that gives customer full freedom to deploy their favorite ML framework on our platform.’
Crosser Technologies was founded in 2016 but the story of the company started with co-founder and head of R&D Uffe Björklund as you can read here. Crosser currently has locations in Stockholm and Sundsvall.
More about the Crosser real-time analytics platform that aims to “help enterprises to integrate the machine world with the rest of their business and accelerate their digital transformation“ on the Crosser platform overview page and more about the A-round financing, various investors, further strategy and plans in the announcement, with comments from various stakeholders
All images courtesy of Crosser Technologies AB.
