With frequent investment and giant crossover, IoT industry is surging
2021-04-29 09:41:31
After a historically transformational year in 2020, IoT seems to be returning to the center stage of the capital markets, with highly active IoT investment and financing events across the board and frequent mega-fundraising.
On April 26, IoT Cloud Platform Graffiti Intelligence and Hillhouse jointly unveiled the Graffiti IoT Industry Fund at the Global Hard Technology Developers Conference.
The fund, which has $400m under management, invests mainly in IoT companies in growth stages around the world.
Tudou Intelligence and Hillhouse said that as the leading IoT cloud platform and investment institutions, both sides will vigorously support the potential enterprises and projects of IoT track, and jointly create a diversified and rich neutral global intelligent business ecology.
After a historic turnaround year in 2020, IoT seems to be returning to capital markets center stage.
Whether in smart home, smart business, smart city, smart industry and agriculture and other fields, they are playing an increasingly important role, IoT investment and financing events in various fields are therefore highly active, and huge financing occurs frequently.
For example, Samsara, an industrial IoT startup, raised $400 million in May 2020 to further expand its industrial IoT business after raising $300 million in Series F financing the year before.
On January 21, 2021, IOT startup Skylo came out of stealth mode and announced the completion of a $103 million B round of financing led by SoftBank Group;
While in China, online education enterprises have announced the launch of intelligent hardware, Shell is the layout of the Internet of Things industry for a long time, the recent action in the field of community intelligence.
IoT, the new trend after the mobile Internet
The reason behind this year's IoT track craze is based on the industry as a whole.
In March this year, Doodle Intelligence went to IPO in the United States, and Hillhouse became an investor of Doodle.
The launch of the Graffiti IoT Industry Fund means that Hillhouse, as one of the largest investment institutions in Asia, has made another increase in the industry.
Zhang Lei, founder of Hillhouse, once pointed out in his book Value that it is a very important ability for an investor to understand key industries and enterprises with huge potential energy.
The IoT industry just has the "potential energy" that Hillhouse values.
From the perspective of policy development, IoT is a key industry supported by the Chinese government in recent years.
In terms of technology, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, edge computing and other technologies continue to develop, sensors, communication network, cloud side data platform and various applications are becoming more and more perfect, accelerating the arrival of the upsurge of IoT development.
In terms of demand, intelligence and digitalization have become an indispensable guarantee for B-end enterprises in production, management and operation, and consumers' acceptance of smart devices is also increasing.
At present, IoT market penetration is still not high, in the "eve" of the coming tuyere, the future growth room is huge.
Tianfeng Securities estimates that a single family needs 50 smart modules to complete the intelligent, but in 2019 there are only 763 million smart modules in the world. Assuming that all of them are for family use, corresponding to about 1 billion families in the world, each family has less than 1 smart module on average.
As a result, the smart module market penetration rate is less than 2%, and there is still room for 50x growth.
It is expected that the shipment of intelligent modules will increase rapidly in the next few years, and the global intelligent process will also accelerate.
After years of gaining momentum, human society has moved from the PC era to the mobile Internet era and is about to enter the IoT era.
It is not hard to see that IoT may become another blue ocean after the mobile Internet.
Three pillars of IoT industry
The three roles of IoT cloud giant, TO C hardware brand and IoT developer platform have become three key forces that cannot be ignored in the IoT industry.
One thing worth mentioning is the IoT developer platform. If cloud giants and To C hardware brands play the roles of "infrastructure builder" and "smart device producer" respectively, the developer platform will be the link of the IoT ecosystem and solve the core pain point of the industry.
In a recent report, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) made this point: "In the mobile Internet era of 10 years ago, during each new generation of device connectivity explosion, giants were born to bring together upstream and downstream players through a unified operating system capability, building strong ecosystems and barriers."
In the mobile Internet era, the rise of Android is a very typical example.
In 2007, Google developed Android and spearheaded the Open Handset Alliance, a group of Handset makers, chipmakers, and carriers.
At the time, Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, said: "The powerful platform we've unveiled will power thousands of different mobile phone models."
He commented that the strategy was "more ambitious than any 'Google phone' that has been speculated about in the media over the past few weeks".
When Android was born, the industry already had the dominant Symbian, Windows mobile operating system, BlackBerry operating system and just cracked iOS, and the way for the latecomber to seek to break the market is -- open source.
At the very beginning, Android adopted open source system and quickly gathered loyal developers from all over the world. Subsequently, a steady stream of application products gradually blossomed and gathered in the application store represented by Google Play, attracting more and more end users to enter the APP ecosystem of the Android system.
CICC believes that "the establishment of the Android ecosystem is to grasp the bilateral network effect between developers and end users".
Open source marks Android as a neutral label and is the entrance of Android's ecosystem taking off. After that, Google provides a large number of SDK developer tools to consolidate its ecosystem on the developer side.
In order to consolidate the ecology at the client end, the value-added services provided by Google family bucket are used to enhance user engagement.
After more than a decade of development, Android has become the world's largest mobile operating system, with about 75% of the market share.
Returning to the IoT ecosystem, the core consists of four basic elements: the device, the networking layer, the application layer, and the cloud.
This industry is doomed to be a "winner-takes-all" market due to the extreme variety of devices. Smart devices of different brands and categories need to be connected with multiple scenarios and diversified applications, so that brands, OEMs and end users can communicate and interact with each other through a variety of smart devices.
Therefore, the industry also needs an IoT developer platform to create an "operating system" for the IoT industry. Through a unified operating system, players from upstream and downstream can be brought together and products from different brands and categories can be linked together to build an IoT ecosystem of everything connected.
Compared to the other two business models, there are very few companies in the IoT industry that are deeply committed to the developer platform.
"Eco-builder" in IoT Era
In the IoT era, Doodle Intelligence is one such "eco-builder".
As of December 31, 2020, the Graffiti IoT developer platform has brought together over 262,000 registered developers and links to over 200 million Powered by Tuya devices.
The connectivity between different Powered by Tuya devices can be achieved across brands and categories.
In March this year, Doodle Intelligence successfully entered the New York Stock Exchange and became the "first stock of IoT cloud platform in the world". The IPO raised more than $900 million, and the market value on the first day of listing was nearly $14 billion, which also proved the huge development potential of this business model from the perspective of capital market.
Moreover, as a neutral and open IoT cloud platform, after helping global enterprises to link a large number of devices together, doodle intelligence has a great opportunity to become the central management platform for these devices, and attract more enterprises to join the ecology, so as to realize the continuous "self-multiplication" of the ecology.
The IOT Industrial Fund jointly launched by Doodle Intelligence and Hillhouse is interpreted by the outside world as an extension of its platform ecological strategy.
If we explore the era of mobile Internet, the key to the rise of Android lies in its open and diversified ecology.
Similarly, in the era of IoT, there is no single platform that can do everything on its own.
Therefore, with the launch of the IoT Industry Fund, Doodle has announced that it will support more developers in the industry, much like Android and Apple did in the early days to encourage developers to join the ecosystem.
It's worth noting that the doodle also announced the "Klein Plan", which will enable the "nine industries". This is in line with the recent flurry of players from various industries who have announced their entry into the IoT industry.
It can be predicted that in the future, the IoT industry ecology will continue to explode, traditional industries will gradually upgrade to smart business, and traditional equipment will gradually upgrade to smart devices.
In the process of industrial intelligent transformation, platform enterprises may become the mainstay, play a key role of "enabling all things intelligent", and lead the tide of the intelligent era.
