Plume Raises $300 Million to Upend Communications Services with AI

— With more than 1.2 billion devices managed in over 35 million homes and small businesses, Plume cements its position as the cloud controller of the world’s largest software-defined network (SDN) — 

Plume®, the personalized communications services pioneer, today announced that it has closed $300 million in a new round of minority equity investment led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. This round brings the company’s valuation to $2.6 billion, with $697 million raised to date. The investment will continue to drive research and development, sales and marketing, new partnerships, and acquisitions as Plume continues its global expansion and hyper-growth. In the last two quarters since its prior round of equity investment by Insight Partners, Plume added more than 13 million new households, over 350 million new managed devices to its global cloud platform, and acquired more than 60 new Communications Service Provider (CSP) customers.

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More than 240 cable multiple system operators (MSOs), telecommunications companies, and fixed wireless access operators of all sizes worldwide rely on Plume as a primary vehicle to grow revenue, increase customer satisfaction and retention, accelerate service velocity and innovation, reduce expenses, avoid commoditization of broadband, and to expand their service area beyond their broadband footprint.  Recently, Plume made the HomePass™ smart home service available to all 25 million U.K. households, in partnership with Virgin Media, including those households in areas not yet covered by the provider’s broadband network footprint.

“The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the adoption of digital services, increasing our dependence on smart devices,” said Nagraj Kashyap, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, who joined the Plume Board of Directors. “Through its innovative cloud data platform, we believe Plume’s consumer-first approach provides customers with reliable connectivity in their homes and beyond. We are pleased to partner with Fahri and the team to support their ambition of reinventing services for smart spaces globally.”

The technology fueling smart spaces, such as homes and small businesses, has experienced mass adoption over the past decade, especially over the last two years. SoftBank estimates that there will be one trillion connected devices by 2025, but CSPs have struggled with optimizing for and delivering exceptional experiences for the modern consumer. Plume addresses this problem by offering a suite of AI-driven, cloud-controlled services for residential consumers and small businesses. Those services include adaptive, self-optimizing WiFi, secure parental and access controls, advanced device security, motion awareness, and back-end applications for CSPs, like predictive support tools and service & network analytics. The data pipeline of these services and connected devices provides unique insight into the smart home and small business.

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“Plume is leading the industry with a cloud, massive data and open-source driven Customer Experience  Management Platform that enables Communications Service Providers to boost in-home WiFi experience for customers while also minimizing their operational expenses substantially,” said Anirudh Bhaskaran, Senior Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Customers benefit from Plume’s constantly expanding platform through OpenSync™, the most widely supported open-source, silicon-to-cloud framework for smart spaces. With OpenSync, CSPs can decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture. Managed by a massively scalable cloud control plane, new services can often be delivered without new equipment, reducing capital spending and extending the useful life of existing infrastructure. Since its creation in 2018, OpenSync has grown to power more than 39 million access points and switches across a broad range of silicon software development kit (SDK) and customer premises equipment (CPE) platforms, and has attracted many third-party developers and contributors.

“Our explosive growth over the last few years is explained simply: Plume has reinvented how services for smart spaces are curated, delivered at scale, and managed and supported. We’re moving beyond the limitations of the legacy approaches that couple hardware and services into a ‘box’—choking the CSPs’ ability to introduce and scale delightful new experiences to the consumers rapidly and effectively,” said Fahri Diner, Founder and CEO of Plume. “Our vision and ambitions are perfectly aligned with SoftBank’s, and we are thankful for their support and confidence in Plume.”

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