Esper Raises $60 Mn Series C Funding Led By Insight Partners The funding round will primarily be used to further expand the platform's ability to get in front of more enterprise customers
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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India and US-based Esper, the DevOps platform for devices, recently 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 just four months ago in May 2021.
This latest funding round will primarily be used to further expand Esper's ability to get in front of more enterprise customers.
"India witnessed unprecedented digital transformation since the pandemic, which makes it a unique market with the potential to adopt DevOps across every industry. Android DevOps has the potential to transform Indian businesses through their journey towards agility, increase operational efficiency, and control costs," said Yadhu Gopalan, chief executive officer, and co-founder, Esper.
There is a massive potential for Indian organizations to adopt Android DevOps across sectors including hospitality, restaurant, healthcare, education, and logistics sectors to deliver contactless services. Esper works with some of the major brands including cult.fit, Teach for India to power and manage their devices, the company said.
"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. This is especially true for devices directly tied to revenue generation or in verticals like medical devices where life might literally be on the line. We built Esper with the customer's customer in mind," Gopalan further added.
"Esper's team in India is pivotal to the company's growth. Currently, 83 employees work out of India and are responsible for designing and engineering Esper's core DevOps platform along with tackling the core marketing and sales functions. We plan to increase the employee count to 200 by 2022 as we are looking to expand the Engineering and Sales functions," shared Shiv Sundar, chief operating officer, and co-founder, Esper.
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"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," mentionedPhilineHuizing, vice president, 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 fourfold 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.
"With Esper, our remote patient monitoring service just works," commentedNeemaMoraveji, co-founder and chief scientist, 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."
"Our biggest opportunity right now is getting the word out to more enterprises that Esper exists," Sundar noted. "No other software does what we do. 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 infrastructures, they no longer have to build themselves."
