According to Fortune Business Insights, the market for the Internet of Things (IoT) will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 25% through 2027. One Concord-based SaaS startup is taking advantage of this expanding market.
Prescient Devices, founded by Andy Wang in 2018, provides what it calls a "low-code IoT solutions platform," called Prescient Designer. Wang describes it as an easy way to program in the cloud in a way that so-called "edge devices" — like routers — can use.
“Low-code simply means that you do not have to program everything... It's drag and drop. And it's like a graphical software — you drag and drop [and] connect the different blocks by lines to indicate how data flows," said Wang. "And engineers are very familiar with that. We build this software that enables engineers to very easily build IoT solutions that partially exist in the cloud, partially exist in edge devices. They can deploy the IoT solution to thousands of thousands of devices just by clicking one button. It's that simple.”
IoT — the terms for physical products that are connected to the internet and collect data — is used for predictive maintenance and remote monitoring. For example, sensors in the concrete of new buildings to measure vibrations and predict when the building will fall.
One of the challenges in the IoT market is that there's no simple way for engineers to create and deploy solutions, according to Wang.
“IoT is very, very hard to apply to scale because you have so many devices out there. So each one has to be smart," he said. "But overall, you have to analyze the behavior of all of your devices together ... the whole technology system is very, very complex. And most engineers today are not able to work with IoT. So the industry kind of slowed down because of engineers' inability to work on IoT systems. And that is the main problem we solve.”
The company also aims to improve IoT security by using proprietary security technology that monitors everything that happens on the IoT devices, immediately alerting users if there's abnormal activity.
Wang said that because IoT solutions are hard to change and improve after they are deployed, companies aren’t able to maximize their return on investment. Prescient Devices provides analytics and feedback so that engineers can make improvements to their solutions from the same platform in real-time.
Wang says that due to the difficult-to-use technology currently available, the general adoption success rate for IoT is only around 11%, but that when companies are able to work with IoT technology, the adoption success rate increases to 73%.
“We enable that capability, we enable the companies to iterate, to work with the technology, to improve the technology over time, because now they can work with IoT. They can build, customize and change the system,” he said.
Prescient Designer is free for users to sign up and develop their own solutions. Once the user is set to deploy their solution, however, the company charges a fee based on the size of the solution.
On April 26, the company closed a $2 million funding round led by Z5 Capital. Wang said that Prescient Devices will be using the money for two things — to improve the product and for sales and marketing. The company will also be hiring application engineers to support customers and more members for its sales and marketing team.
“We're now focusing on execution. We have users, we have over two dozen companies using our solution now," said Wang. "So we're very busy supporting them, learning from them, and finding out what features we need to improve. And so that's the number one priority to serve our customers, to understand our customers. And we have a lot of things in place. This is only in version one of our software. We have even bigger features that we wanted to build in for version two.”
