Madrona Venture Group leads round Supporting First DevOps platform for Orchestrating Android Smart Devices

Esper.io announced the closing of their Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from all existing seed investors including Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Haystack Ventures, and Pathbreaker Ventures.

“Esper’s team brings years of the platform, mobile, retail and customer experience at Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft to this problem and their platform provides a clean end-to-end experience for companies building out these important networks.”

Esper provides a platform for the creation, deployment, updating, and monitoring of remote smart touch-screen devices and their associated applications and firmware. These Android-based edge devices such as tablets, kiosks, point-of-sale, and mobile payment devices with which consumers interact daily are rapidly proliferating. The overall market is growing 26% annually with more than 7 million developers worldwide working on applications and networks for these devices.

By 2024 it is expected that there will be over 200M Android devices deployed in the dedicated device space. These devices as they are being deployed today lack a comprehensive DevOps platform. Esper’s full-stack offering enables enterprises to efficiently develop, manage and monitor these devices securely across the different versions of Android and device types.

“Esper enables engineering teams to deploy their applications to dedicated and mission-critical devices with confidence and ease. Esper’s vision is to provide a platform that allows our customers to focus on their user experience and not infrastructure,” commented Yadhu Gopalan, co-founder, and CEO. “We are excited to have the full support of these investors to expand our great team and further scale our business to help customers move beyond legacy management systems that were not built for modern needs, into a true DevOps solution.”

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“Deploying, monitoring and maintaining remote devices is a huge issue in the enterprise – everything from the bespoke point of sale tablets to exercise equipment run on Android. And there is currently no system to easily develop, update or even know when devices are malfunctioning,” commented Terry Myerson, Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. “Esper’s team brings years of the platform, mobile, retail and customer experience at Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft to this problem and their platform provides a clean end-to-end experience for companies building out these important networks.” As part of the financing Tim Porter, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group will join the board and Terry Myerson will join as a board observer.

Esper offers a full-stack solution for deploying and managing smart connected Android devices in fleets of all sizes across geographic locations. Engineering and operations teams can use Esper to:

• Increase business agility with fine-grained control and management of all of applications and firmware across their entire heterogeneous Android fleet
• Automate previously manual processes using telemetry for analytics, alerts, and actions to increase fleet uptime and reliability
• Diagnose deployed applications and devices in real-time solving problems faster and with superior efficiency
• Reduce resources needed to intelligently deploy and scale device fleets
• Enforce security by locking device and applications supplemented with continuous monitoring at a system and application level

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In addition to providing a platform-as-a-service, Esper enables device manufacturers and chipset vendors to deliver a lean Android solution purpose-built for the smart dedicated device space. With Esper Enhanced Android the platform can seamlessly enroll and manage devices to achieve no-touch drop-ship directly from the factory to deployment sites and addresses the challenge of receiving and managing timely Android system updates for increased security and uptime.

Esper is growing quickly with over 25 customers and tens of thousands of devices on the platform. Esper has offices in the Bay Area and India and is aggressively building their Seattle-area engineering team as well as hiring sales, marketing, and customer success professionals to further accelerate growth and service their expanding customer base.

Esper co-founders, CEO Yadhu Gopalan and COO Shiv Sundar bring years of experience with Android and enterprise applications. Yadhu most recently was at Amazon where he was the head of system engineering for Amazon Go and helped build FireOS using the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Previously he worked at Microsoft where he built the kernel and tools for Windows CE and Windows Phone. Shiv brings years of experience building Android-based partnerships for companies such as Samsung and Cyanogen and helped bring Windows Phone to device makers worldwide.

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