Internet of things state of union
A great report has just been published by venture capital company Wing about the global panorama of Internet of Things startup companies and adoption by their target consumers.
The report is based on the analysis of 2,000+ deals, the context around the creation and exit activities, and interviews to IoT pioneers.
The report main conclusions are:
- Entrepreneurial activity still appears but there’s signs of a slowdown
- Industrial/Enterprise IoT accounts for the largest number of funding deals
- Auto/Transport category is number one in the average deal size
- Drones category activity is moving from hardware to software
- Security-focused startups have had few deals
The electricity introduction and adoption shown in the chart above reveals a huge gap (tens of years) until the usage of the first group of electricity-based appliances got traction. However, due to technological evolution, the interval between new products launch and adoption got shorter and quicker over time.
Using the parallel with electricity, I would suggest that IoT devices will behave similarly to electricity paving the way for “applications” to be the appliances, or the problem solvers to users both in professional and personal markets. As platforms and communications inter-devices proliferate, solution providers will specialize in addressing use cases such as house comfort or production push methodologies.
With the power of connecting devices at each user fingertips, most of devices might get commoditized and the value will be unlock by user applications.
Pedro Antao Alves 