- The firmware issues take a lot of time to work with for the teams.
- Memfault, a startup, plans to launch a self-service in its own product through a bottom-up approach.
Introduction:
Memfault is a startup company that develops software for consumer device firmware delivery, monitoring, and diagnostics. In a series A funding round, it closed $8.5 million today. CEO Francois Baldassari says that the capital will enable the startup to scale the engineering team and provide investments for product development and marketing.
Slow, inefficient, costly, and reactive processes continue to trouble firmware engineering teams. Most often the companies recruit customers as product testers. This is the first indication of the device issue that comes through users by contacting customer service for voice dissatisfaction on social media.
With 30 billion Internet-Of-Things devices to be in use by 2025, the hardware monitoring and debugging methods would struggle to keep up with the pace. As a case in point, Palo Alto networks unit 42 predicts that 99% of all IoT traffic comes on encrypted which exposes personal and confidential data on the network.
History of the startup:
The veterans of Oculus, Fitbit, and Pebble founded Memfault in 2019. It is known to offer a solution in a cloud-based firmware observability platform. The customers can capture and debug the issues remotely while continuously monitoring the fleets of devices in the network.
The company has developed a software development kit that is designed to be deployed on devices that capture data and send it to the cloud for analysis. The backend of the software identifies, classifies, and removes the redundancy of the error reports while spotlighting the highly prevalent issues.
Statement from Baldassari:
Baldassari says that he, Tyler Hoffman, and Christopher Coleman conceived of Memfault when they were working on the embedded software team at a smartwatch startup called Pebble. Every week there were thousands of customers who reached out and complained about Bluetooth connectivity issues, battery life regressions, and unexpected resets.
It was a time-consuming process for the teams to investigate into the box. The teams had to either reproduce the issues on their units or ask the customers to send their watches back so that they could be opened and analyzed.
How they landed up the idea behind the startup:
Baldassari and his co-founders found inspiration from web development to improve this process. The framework supports the management of millions of devices that turned out to be Memfault. With the aggregation of bugs across software releases and hardware revisions, the company says that its platform can determine which devices are impacted and what stack they use. The developers can inspect backtrace variables and registers when encountering an error and for updates, they can split the devices into cohorts to limit fleet-wide issues.
The startup also delivers real-time reports on the device check-in and alerts for unexpected connection inactivity. The teams can view the device and fleet health data which includes battery life connection state and use of memory. They can also track down how many devices have installed a release and how many have run into problems.
Statement from the founder:
“We’re building feedback mechanisms into our software which allows our users to label an error we have not caught, to merge duplicate errors, and to split up distinct errors which have been merged by mistake,” said Baldassari. “This data is a shoo-in for machine learning, and will allow us to automatically detect errors which cannot be identified with simple heuristics.”
The IDC predicts that Global IoT revenue will reach $742 billion by the time it is 2020. Despite the industry’s continuous growth, it has become a challenge that not every organization thinks they are ready for this. In a recent Kaspersky Lab survey, 54% of them said that the risk associated with connection and integration of the IoT ecosystem remains a huge challenge.
Maybe that is why Memfault has to compete with Amazon AWS IoT device management and Microsoft Azure IoT edge. These two support a full range of containerization and isolation features. Another heavyweight rival is Google’s cloud IoT which is a set of tools that connect, process, store, and analyze edge device data. Other startups like Balena, Zededa, Particle, and Axonius provide full-stack IoT device management and development resources.
Future plans:
Partech led Memfault’s series A to raise with participation from Uncork Capital drinks San Francisco California based companies total that raised dollar 11 million. The startup says that it will use the funding to announce a self-service of its product for a “bottom-up” adoption instead of having a sales-driven, top-down approach it has right now.
Baldassari firmly believes that the company’s automation features in particular give the platform a way to stand out from the rest of the market. “Despite the ubiquity of connected devices, hardware teams are too often bound by a lack of visibility into device health and a reactive cycle of waiting to be notified of potential issues,” he said in a press release. “Memfault has reimagined hardware diagnostics to instead operate with the similar flexibility, speed, and innovation that has proven so successful with software development. Memfault has saved our customers millions of dollars and engineering hours, and empowered teams to approach product development with the confidence that they can ship better products, faster, with the knowledge they can fix bugs, patch, and update without ever disrupting the user experience.”
