Viam Inc., an open-source cloud-based software platform that manages data for smart machines, announced Tuesday it has raised $45 million in new funding to expand its enterprise partnerships and deepen its developer ecosystem.

The Series B round included participation from existing investors Union Square Ventures and Battery Ventures. The new funding brings the total raised by the company to $87 million.

Founded in 2020 by Chief Executive Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and former chief technology officer of MongoDB, Viam is designed to act as a bridge between hardware, the cloud and artificial intelligence for “smart machines.” This means any hardware, robotics and sensors in the real world that collect data so it can be fed into the cloud so that it can be analyzed and acted upon across the entire stack.

“Everywhere we look, we’re surrounded by devices that promise a lot, and deliver a little,” said Horowitz. “From the beginning, our guiding thesis has been that if we can make it easier to write software for those machines — if we can empower developers with flexible, intuitive, and powerful tools — we’ll massively accelerate innovation in the real world.”

Horowitz argues that Viam solves this problem in a unique way by combining hardware and software under a single umbrella in a way that’s not the usual: It includes low-level hardware application programming interfaces, software algorithms, cloud collectivity, integrated fleet management, remote monitoring, tele-operations, predictive maintenance, mobile access and AI.

Combining all these parts creates a platform that gives developers a way to access an entire constellation of smart devices, including internet of things devices, industrial robots and home devices. All without needing to learn how to program for 10 different vendors that don’t use the same protocols or languages.

By making the platform modular and “pluggable,” developers can easily add IoT devices, automation, alerting and monitoring for home and industrial applications. Examples could include the automatic detection of anomalies in machinery that monitoring software could diagnose and remediate quickly by fine-tuning activity before alerting repair crews to check. Water flow detectors could monitor for leaks by determining if extra flow was happening during off hours, shut off the offending valves and have plumbers look at the pipes for potential problems.

“Whether it’s a home HVAC or machines on an assembly line, machine downtime has a massive impact on people’s lives and livelihoods,” said Horowitz. “Viam’s assertion — now becoming visible in the world — is that any kind of machine should be accessible remotely, completely securely, be able to provide enough data to diagnose issues, and ideally prevent any serious issues.”

Viam’s funding comes shortly after the company partnered with the Whale and Vessel Safety Task Force earlier this month to establish an open data collection for North Atlantic Right Whale conservation efforts. As an endangered species, these whales face numerous threats, including the risk of vessel strikes. In partnership with WAVS, Viam helped develop data capture technology that would use data from existing hardware such as navigation, communication systems, infrared and visual cameras on vessels to produce a dataset for AI to help reduce the risk for whales.

Eliot said that in addition to the funding, Viam has ongoing partnerships that include working with industrial, automation and innovation teams aimed at keeping machines running smoothly using edge networks, enabling device-to-cloud data pipelines for data monitoring, predictive maintenance and remote diagnostics. Other partnerships would continue the company’s foray into deploying machine learning and AI models through Viam’s Modular Registry to handle real-world applications.

Image: Chombosan/Shutterstock