In a recent funding round led by Sway Ventures, a young IoT platform Evrythng has closed $24.8 million in Series B funding, continuing its streak of successful funding campaigns and gaining a leg up in the market.
As an IoT platform, Evrythng provides solutions for large enterprises that allow them to manage “intelligent software identities” for products that have smart tags like QR codes or are directly connected to the Internet. In layman’s terms, this means that companies using the Evrythng platform can track their products through the entire supply chain and throughout their lifecycle, while consumers can interact with the product to get more information about it or simply reorder it.
The Internet of Things has no shortage of IoT platforms, ranging from big players like AWS IoT, Appcelerator, and Azure IoT Suite to up and coming contenders such as Filament and Kontakt.io. While the well-known companies have substantial financial backing, the emerging companies often rely on crowdfunding to grow their operations and expand their services.
But how does Evrythng stack up to the competition? How do they handle data security and how easy is it to access analytics? And finally, which protocols do they use for data collection? Let’s explore those questions.
What Does Evrythng Offer?
The team behind Evrythng believes that every physical product, be it the clothes we wear or the homes we live in, can be connected to the Internet and become smart. The platform provides solutions for everything from brand protection and inventory management to consumer engagement and product registration.
Each product can be tracked via its own digital identity which allows you to know where a given product is at any point in time, whether someone is tampering with it, as well as how the consumer interacts with it. From the consumer’s perspective, they can unlock personalized content and take advantage of loyalty rewards during the buying process or after the purchase.
How Does Evrythng Stack Up to the Competition?
While most IoT platforms seem to focus on facilitating the communication between various smart devices, Evrythng provides a solution for products like the beer you enjoy on a Saturday afternoon after a barbecue or the tennis shoes you buy in preparation for your next marathon.
Regardless of that, they still offer the industry standard features of information security, data collection protocols, and data analytics.
Information Security
Given the nature of the platform’s focus, Evrythng uses their own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based on Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates which are used to store data in the cloud. Accessing products and relevant data is also protected by token-based and Two-Factor Authentication. In addition to that, external applications such as Facebook or Google can gain access to smart products via OAUTH 2.0 protocol.
Compared to some of the big players like AWS IoT, which uses TLS encryption and the AWS method of authentication (called ‘SigV4’) as well as the X.509 certificate based authentication, Evrythng shows that they take information security seriously. This is further backed by 24/7 monitoring and security controls that prevent unauthorized access.
Data Collection Protocols
The majority of IoT platforms use messaging protocols such as MQTT, web transfer protocols such as HTTP and CoAP, text-messaging protocol STOMP or WebSockets protocol to collect data. Most of them are designed to be lightweight, with low energy use and low network bandwidth functionality.
According to Evrythng, their platform supports MQTT, CoAP, and WebSockets. This allows them to use not only text-messaging and smart tags such as QR codes, NFC, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), but also printed electronics, sensors, and chips.
What makes Evrythng stand out is the ability to use smartphones to scan products without the need to download a special app or change the product packaging.
Data Analytics
Another point where Evrythng meets the industry standard is the real-time analytics feature which lets enterprises know how their product is performing at any given moment. It can also provide an overview of their consumers and how customer interaction with the product impacts sales. The data can easily be accessed through their dashboard.
Even big IoT platforms like AWS IoT and Appcelerator have their own dashboards for tracking analytics, so it’s no wonder that a company like Evrythng follows in the same footsteps to stay competitive.
The Future of Evrythng
Evrythng may be a relatively young company but it’s already pushing the envelope in the IoT sphere and proving to be a serious contender. With features that are on par with other IoT platforms, it’s demonstrated that customers who want to serve smart, trackable physical products also want to have the same level of security, insight, and scalability as those who use platforms that focus on connecting smart devices.
Paired with their vision of using digital connectivity to better the world around us, Evrythng’s prospects are looking up.
Brenda Barron is a writer from Southern California specializing in technology and business. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her outdoors with her family or knitting.
Judging by the amount of IoT platforms available to the consumers, I am going to say there is a lot of room to grow these types of systems.
I love using IFTTT for automating some tasks that I take on each week. The system works well and when you can connect a smart device to it that is even nicer.
I am a stat nerd and having the dashboard filled with information about what is connected, what it is doing or where it is would be a huge selling point for me. I hope this platform takes off, I would really like to see it used in the real world.
Personally, I use IFTTT and I get plenty of use out of it. I am happy to see another service coming into the marketplace for IoT.
As long as it can provide a connection for all of the “connected” products they hope to see I am game on trying the system out.