[PR] HiveMQ Raises €9.3 million Seed Round to Accelerate Growth and Meet Demand for IoT connectivity
Earlybird and Senovo lead initial round of financing to be used for increased R&D and accelerated growth of sales and marketing
Landshut, Germany — May 6, 2021 — HiveMQ, a global leader of enterprise MQTT solutions, announced they have raised €9.3 million in a seed funding round. The funding round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Senovo Capital Management with participation from business angels Ali Kutay, Mirko Novakovic, Daniel Schellhoss and Charles Songhurst.
HiveMQ helps companies connect millions of IoT devices to the cloud in a reliable, scalable and secure manner. Its 130+ production customers include global brands such as BMW, Daimler, Deutsche Telekom, Liberty Global, Moen, Siemens, ZF and many more.
HiveMQ will leverage the new funding round to significantly expand sales and marketing efforts, capitalizing on the market demand for IoT solutions. HiveMQ will also increase R&D investment in their cloud-managed MQTT service and introduce new products into the market.
“The participation of experienced venture capital companies and angel investors in our seed round is a great validation of the HiveMQ vision,” explains Christian Götz, CEO and co-founder of HiveMQ. “HiveMQ has been successful generating significant revenue to self-fund our operations. We have been able to acquire lighthouse customers in our targeted industries and are seeing tremendous interest in these industries for our solution. To accelerate the next phase of our company’s growth, we will use this new investment to expand our sales and marketing teams to build on this success and accelerate the adoption of our solution. We will increase R&D investment in the HiveMQ Cloud, a key aspect of our product portfolio, as more customers move to a multi-cloud computing strategy.”
The IoT market is expected to grow to $2.4 trillion by 2027 (Business Insider, March 2020). HiveMQ is well positioned to capitalize on this growth with its IoT messaging platform which provides the capability to deploy IoT applications in a scalable and reliable manner. HiveMQ is based on the MQTT protocol that is widely used for IoT connectivity. Through the HiveMQ platform, customers have deployed millions of IoT devices connected to business-critical systems.
“It’s impressive to see marquee brands using HiveMQ as the platform for their IoT applications,” shares Hendrik Brandis, Co-founder and Partner at Earlybird. “I look forward to helping HiveMQ expand their market reach and capitalize on opportunities to become the de-facto standard for an IoT messaging layer. It will be great to see how HiveMQ connects, among others, the global automotive industry: from customers opening their car via app, to car-to-car communication, to automated and connected production processes to build these cars.”
About HiveMQ
HiveMQ helps companies connect devices to the Internet. Our HiveMQ MQTT platform makes it possible to move data from device to cloud in a secure, reliable and scalable manner. Over 130 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies, rely on HiveMQ in production for mission-critical use cases like connected cars, transportation, logistics, Industry 4.0 and connected IoT products. Visit hivemq.com for more details.
About Earlybird
Earlybird is a venture capital investor focused on European technology companies. Founded in 1997, Earlybird invests in all growth and development phases of a company. Amongst the most experienced venture investors in Europe, Earlybird offers its portfolio companies not only financial resources, but also strategic and operational support as well as access to an international network and capital markets. Earlybird manages different funds with a focus on digital technologies in Eastern and Western Europe as well as healthcare technologies. With EUR 1.5 billion under management, eight IPOs and 30 trade sales, Earlybird is one of the most successful venture capital firms in Europe.
For further information: www.earlybird.com
About Senovo
Senovo is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Munich and Berlin that partners with exceptional founders building global B2B SaaS category-leaders from Europe.
As European first-mover, the fund invests since 2013 into a new generation of B2B software startups which enable the digitalization of medium and large enterprises. Their focus is primarily on supporting teams working in the areas of process optimization, industry 4.0 and data-enabled solutions.
Senovo joins the journey after a company has first revenues in a late Seed or Series A round. Their team of SaaS specialists seek meaningful eye-level relationships and regularly publish their learnings and thought leadership at www.medium.com/senovovc.
Web: www.senovo.vc
