Our Investment in Deviceplane

Every day it seems we meet incredible teams bringing intelligent hardware to life. It's no surprise, as the preconditions have never been better. Last decade's mobile wave drove innovation across the component stack, from processing, to sensing, to connectivity — packing real punch into small factors. Costs also came down with mobile-led scale, lowering the hurdle to test simple concepts. We’ve seen an explosion in edge devices in response: fitness trackers, connected cameras, drones, autonomous vehicles and other robotics.

But the gains we've seen in the hardware belie the overall ease of coding them. Building, testing and deploying software to edge devices feels nothing like shipping a web app. Teams spend disproportionate time and attention rolling homegrown tools — filling gaps around things like deployment, management, and monitoring. If the axiom "hardware is hard" still rings true, the least we can do is soften the path of layering software on them.

Deviceplane builds management tools for embedded systems and edge computing. They tie together the power of the cloud with the dynamism of microservices to make deploying and monitoring edge devices as seamless as launching a SaaS product. Josh was an infrastructure engineer at Segment — coming to us by way of Rancher where he spent years thinking about the principles of containers applied to the edge. We're so excited to lead Deviceplane’s seed and support them through the winter YC20 batch.

And we’re hiring!