- Charter Communications, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Belkin, and Service Electric Cablevision join Liberty Global in Plume's equity investor syndicate -
PALO ALTO, California, Feb. 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart Home Services pioneer Plume has closed a new financing round of $85 million. This includes $60 million in Series D preferred equity and $25 million in debt financing, bringing Plume's total equity funding to $127 million. The new investor syndicate, including Charter Communications, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Belkin, and Service Electric Cablevision, took approximately 75% of the Series D round. Existing investors, including Liberty Global and Shaw Communications also participated. The debt facility was provided by Silicon Valley Bank and WestRiver Group. Andrew Ip, Senior Vice President, Emerging Technology & Innovation of Charter Communications joined Plume's Board of Directors.
Led by Fahri Diner, Co-founder and CEO, Plume provides a Consumer Experience Management (CEM) platform as a cloud SaaS offering. Adopted by over 30 leading communications service providers including Comcast, Charter, and Armstrong in the US, Bell and Shaw Communications in Canada, Virgin Media, VOO, and Melita in Europe, and J:COM in Japan, the Plume platform enables the curation, delivery, support, and management of personalized Smart Home Services for consumers. The Smart Home Services category is a primary growth vector for forward-looking service providers looking to differentiate broadband offerings while improving customer retention.
"Our partnership with Plume has been critical to the success of Charter's 'Advanced In-Home WiFi' roll-out and has enabled Charter to accelerate innovation and more rapidly deliver new features to our Spectrum Internet and WiFi customers – from the ability to optimize their home networks to greater control over their devices," said Ip. "Charter has seen first-hand the technical innovation of the Plume team and is pleased to join Plume's syndicate. I look forward to supporting the next phase of Plume's expansion."
"We've been enthusiastic investors and committed supporters of Plume since their Series A, and are now excited to partner with these industry leaders in the journey," said Ankur Prakash, Vice President at Liberty Global Ventures and a board member of Plume. "It has been really satisfying to be a part of this incredible growth and such a talented team."
With over 650 million devices communicating with 16 million OpenSync™ switches across 14 million households, Plume's cloud controller operates the largest software-defined network in the world. Created and open-sourced by Plume in 2018, the OpenSync framework is the fastest growing initiative of its kind that enables the curation, delivery of support and services, and management of devices throughout the smart home. Beyond service providers, OpenSync has been broadly adopted by the OEM/ODM access points, consumer electronics, and has been pre-integrated and supported by leading silicon & processor platforms. The rapidly expanding consumer-facing Smart Home Services suite powered by OpenSync and offered by Plume currently includes Adaptive WiFi™, secure parental and access controls via HomePass®, Plume AI Security™, and Plume Motion™, as well as operator-facing support, operations, and marketing suites designed to enhance service delivery, visibility, and scale.
Telecom Infra Project (TIP), one of the largest cross-functional working groups in the world with more than 500 member organizations including Facebook, leading service providers including Deutsche Telekom, technology providers, developers, chipset and device manufacturers, and integrators across the telecommunications industry, also announced earlier this week that it has adopted OpenSync as its open access point software stack, and has demonstrated compatibility with multiple controller platforms.
"We believe in the cloud, a massively scalable data-driven platform, a SaaS delivery model, and an open-source approach to build a market-leading, high-growth enterprise efficiently and with operating leverage," said Fahri Diner, Co-founder and CEO of Plume. "I'm hugely thankful for our people, customers, partners, and investors for helping us deliver on our promise, and honored by the confidence of our new investors and strategic partners."
About Plume
Plume is the creator of the world's first Consumer Experience Management (CEM) Platform powered by OpenSync™. As the only open and hardware-independent solution, Plume enables the curation and delivery of new Smart Home Services rapidly and at massive scale. The Plume service bundle which includes Plume Adaptive WiFi™, HomePass®, AI Security™, and Plume Motion™ is managed by the Plume Cloud, a data- and AI-driven cloud controller currently running the largest software-defined network in the world. Plume leverages OpenSync™, an open-source framework which integrates into a broad set of silicon & platform SDKs for connection to the Plume Cloud.
Visit www.plume.com, www.platform.plume.com, and www.opensync.io.
Plume, Powered by Plume, Plume Adaptive WiFi, AI Security, SuperPod, HomePass, Plume Motion, OpenSync and Signal are either trademarks, or registered trademarks of Plume Design, Inc.
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