A startup called Memfault Inc. is exiting stealth mode today armed with $8.5 million in early-stage funding for its cloud-based observability platform for “internet of things” devices.

The Series A round was led by Partech and also included the participation of existing investor Uncork Capital. It brings the startup’s total amount raised to more than $10 million following an earlier seed funding round.

Founded in 2018, Memfault is led by a team of engineers that previously worked with connected device companies such as Pebble Technology Corp., Fitbit Inc. and Oculus VR. Memfault’s founders have created an observability platform that can identify bugs and other problems in the firmware of a wide range of different connected devices.

Previously, debugging of IoT devices has always been a slow, inefficient and reactive process that involves waiting on users to report any problems. It means that consumers act as the product testers, and that’s far from ideal since it can easily result in unhappy customers voicing their dissatisfaction with the devices they buy through social media and product review channels. That harms the product’s reputation and, if a problem is widespread, it will almost certainly have a negative impact on its sales.

With Memfault’s observability platform, IoT developers are able to remotely monitor entire fleets of devices to identify any issues that come up and quickly debug them at scale through firmware updates. The technology is based on a software development kit that can be deployed on any connected device.

It then captures data from each device as it’s being used and sends that information to the cloud where it can be analyzed. That enables software developers to identify the most prevalent bugs, sometimes even before the user will realize it, the company said.

Observability is a one of the fastest-growing segments within the enterprise software market, but up until now most platforms have been focused on maintaining the health of cloud-based applications and infrastructure, with little focus on IoT.

Memfault Chief Executive François Baldassari told SiliconANGLE that the biggest players in the observability market specialize in very specific applications. For example, VMWare Inc. is focused on aggressively on the server market, while its recent acquisition target Mesh7 Inc. sold observability software for Kubernetes and cloud-clusters. Other players, such as New Relic Inc. and Splunk Inc., provide observability for networks and applications, he said.

“IoT [observability] presents unique challenges that incumbents are not well positioned to answer,” Baldassari said. “Power, bandwidth and compute are extremely limited and require a different approach and architecture. Additionally, IoT devices aren’t always connected using traditional protocols, so observability requires solving a networking and connectivity challenge on top of the traditional monitoring challenges.”

The executive said that in addition to its basic observability tools, Memfault adds software update and configuration management capabilities that enable developers to “close the loop” on any issue they detect by pushing a fix out to their devices via a firmware upgrade.

“Traditional observability vendors do not typically handle the deployment piece, which makes Memfault a bit of a hybrid,” Baldassari said.

The company appears confident that there will be big demand for its platform. It cited a November 2020 IOT Analytics study that says more than 30 billion IoT devices will be in use worldwide by 2025. Traditional hardware monitoring and debugging methods simply cannot keep up with the pace of smart device adoption, the company argues.

Baldassari said his company’s platform has already saved its customers millions of dollars and engineering hours. “Memfault has reimagined hardware diagnostics to instead operate with the similar flexibility, speed and innovation that has proven so successful with software development,” he said.

Looking ahead, Memfault said it will soon release a new, self-service version of its platform that will help streamline integration for developers. Interested developers can sign up for early access to that platform now.

Image: Memfault