Insight Partners Leads Latest Financing, Esper’s Second in 2021
Esper, the industry’s leading DevOps platform for devices, announced $60 million in Series C funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors including Scale Venture Partners, Madrona Ventures and Root Ventures. The investment brings Esper’s total funding to $100 million and follows the company’s $30 million Series B in May. Esper is the industry’s first DevOps platform for intelligent edge devices and was named one of the top 10 hottest startups in 2021 by CRN.
Enterprise edge devices are in a fast-growing category that includes everything from the tablets used in travel, restaurants, and warehouses, to medical devices, fitness equipment, and in-store kiosks. Esper is the only software platform that lets organizations remotely scale, manage, secure, and update mission-critical edge devices and custom apps using the proven DevOps practices now considered standard in web app development.
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“Customer expectations are higher than ever. When a point of sale terminal in a retailer is out of order, the merchant doesn’t have the time or expertise to fix it. These devices are mission critical and expected to work flawlessly 24/7,” says Shiv Sundar, COO and co-founder at Esper. “This is especially true for devices directly tied to revenue generation, or in verticals like medical devices where a life might literally be on the line. We built Esper with the customer’s customer in mind.”
Edge devices are a new path to connecting with more customers in more places, but challenges persist.
“For years now, we’ve seen these massive projections about IOT devices of all kinds. But on the ground, enterprises and SMBs are struggling with the reality that large-scale deployments of devices are hard and expensive when you go it alone,” said Philine Huizing, Vice President at Insight Partners. “Esper has emerged as the only platform that provides modern DevOps capabilities in a package purpose built for intelligent edge devices. And even better, developers tell us that they love using Esper.”
Esper has over 200 paying customers and over 2,000 developers using its platform for product development. Esper addresses verticals as diverse as fast food, healthcare, connected fitness, retail, and digital signage, driving 2021 revenue 4x higher than the year prior and making Esper one of the fastest growing startups in the enterprise software sector. The Seattle-based company quadrupled headcount during 2021 and tripled its office footprint in Bellevue on a square footage basis.
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As this hyper-growth attests, innovative brands are using Esper to move from whiteboard to deployment faster than they ever thought possible. This is particularly important in markets like healthcare, where ease of use and continuous uptime are critical:
“With Esper, our remote patient monitoring service just works,” said Neema Moraveji, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Spire Health. “Esper’s seamless deployment ensures that even patients who are not as comfortable with technology can successfully use our service. Device set-up is simple, there is zero configuration needed by the patients, and Esper’s full-service solution detects connectivity and sensor failures ahead of time and alerts the Spire team for proactive outreach to our patients, often before they even notice an issue.”
This latest funding round will primarily be used to further expand Esper’s ability to get in front of more enterprise customers.
“Our biggest opportunity right now is getting the word out to more enterprises that Esper exists,” said Yadhu Gopalan, CEO and co-founder at Esper. “Our customers tell us that we are completely resetting their assumptions about what is possible. It’s truly rewarding to see the light bulb go off when a customer realizes all of the infrastructure they no longer have to build themselves.”
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