Plume start-up raises $ 85 million to accelerate adoption of smart Wi-Fi service

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The start-up Plume, a specialist in smart health connected homes, announced on Wednesday February 26, 2020 that it had secured financing to the tune of 85 million dollars. This includes $ 60 million in preferred shares for new investors, the largest of which are Charter Communications, Qualcomm Ventures, Belkin and Service Electric Cablevision.

Its first supporters, Liberty Global and Shaw Communications, also put their hands in their pockets. A debt collection of $ 25 million has been contracted from banks Silicon Valley and WesterRiver. This transaction brings Plume's total funding to $ 127 million and its valuation to $ 510 million.

A Wi-Fi mesh specialist with a SaaS business model

Founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, Plume offers a Wi-Fi Mesh system for individuals. As a reminder, mesh systems (by mesh) use several routers to guarantee better coverage throughout the house. They are to be opposed to the classic method: a single router which transmits very loudly near where it is located, and which sometimes badly serves the most distant rooms or which are behind thick walls. Another factor popularizing these systems is the increase in the number of smart health connected objects in homes, which can tend to saturate routers.

Plume sets itself apart from the competition by proposing an "intelligent" system which, according to it, adapts to the specific environment in which the system is placed, and to the bandwidth requirements of network devices. Its main competitors are Netgear, Belkin, Eero (acquired by Amazon in 2019) and Google Nest. The company sells its solution as a subscription, starting at $ 99 per month.

AN OPEN STANDARD to seduce operators

But Plume is also aimed at professionals with OpenSync, an open standard launched in 2018 with Samsung to support its customers in the development of services. Offered in SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), the product has, according to the start-up, been adopted by "more than 30 leading providers in communications" – among them the Americans Comcast, Charter and Armstrong, the Canadian Bell, the European Virgin Media, Voo and Melita or the Japanese JCom. Plume also ensures that "650 million devices communicate today with some 16 million OpenSync switches in 14 million homes worldwide".

Charter Communications, which operates under the trade name of Spectrum, is one of the largest cable operators in the United States, and the latest to adopt OpenSync. He launched a service to expose the connection status on an application, which allows you to delete the latter for given devices or to limit access to guests via specific profiles.

 "This partnership with Plume has been essential for Charter's success in deploying 'advanced WiFi' in the health home. It has enabled us to accelerate innovation and deliver new features more quickly to our Spectrum Internet customers and WiFi – from the ability to optimize their health home networks to greater control of their devices, "Said Andrew Ip, deputy general manager of emerging technologies at Charter Communications.

Note that the interdisciplinary working group Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which has more than 500 member organizations – among which are Facebook, Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, or Intel – also announced at the beginning of the week that it had adopted OpenSync as the software brick of open source access points.

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