DevOps Platform Company Esper Raises $7.6 Million

By Dan Anderson ● Feb 20, 2020
  • DevOps platform company Esper.io announced it closed 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.

DevOps platform company Esper.io announced it closed 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.

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

Within the next few years, it is expected that there will be over 200 million Android devices deployed in the dedicated device space. And as these devices are being deployed, there is a lack of a comprehensive DevOps platform. Esper’s full-stack offering enables enterprises to efficiently develop, manage, and monitor 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,” said Esper CEO Yadhu Gopalan. “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.”

Esper offers a full-stack solution for deploying and managing smart connected Android devices in fleets of all sizes across geographic locations. And 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. And it can be used to automate previously manual processes using telemetry for analytics, alerts, and actions to increase fleet uptime and reliability. Plus Esper can be used for diagnosing deployed applications and devices in real-time solving problems faster and with superior efficiency and reducing resources needed to intelligently deploy and scale device fleets. Plus it enforces security by locking device and applications supplemented with continuous monitoring at a system and application level.

“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,” added 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 has been growing quickly with over 25 customers and tens of thousands of devices on the platform. And Esper co-founders CEO Yadhu Gopalan and COO Shiv Sundar bring years of experience with Android and enterprise applications.

Gopalan was most recently at Amazon where he was the head of system engineering for Amazon Go and helped build FireOS using the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). And previously he worked at Microsoft where he built the kernel and tools for Windows CE and Windows Phone.

And Sundar brings years of experience building Android-based partnerships for companies such as Samsung and Cyanogen and helped bring Windows Phone to device makers worldwide.