Smart Home Services Company Plume Raises $85 Million

By Noah Long • Feb 27, 2020
  • Smart Home Services company Plume announced it has closed a new $85 million round of funding

Smart Home Services company Plume announced it has closed a new $85 million round of funding. This includes $60 million in Series D preferred equity and $25 million in debt financing. And this brings Plume’s total equity funding to $127 million.

The new investor syndicate — including Charter Communications, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Belkin, and Service Electric Cablevision — took approximately 75% of the Series D round. And existing investors, including Liberty Global and Shaw Communications also participated. The debt facility was provided by Silicon Valley Bank and WestRiver Group. Andrew Ip, Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology & Innovation of Charter Communications, has joined Plume’s Board of Directors in connection with the funding round.

Plume — which is led by Co-founder and CEO Fahri Diner — provides a Consumer Experience Management (CEM) platform as a cloud SaaS offering. And adopted by over 30 leading communications service providers including Comcast, Charter, and Armstrong in the US, Bell and Shaw Communications in Canada, Virgin Media, VOO, and Melita in Europe, and J:COM in Japan, the Plume platform essentially enables the curation, delivery, support, and management of personalized Smart Home Services for consumers.

With more than 650 million devices communicating with 16 million OpenSync switches across 14 million households, Plume’s cloud controller operates the largest software-defined network in the world. And created and open-sourced by Plume in 2018, the OpenSync framework is the fastest growing initiative of its kind that enables the curation, delivery of support and services, and management of devices throughout the smart home.

Beyond service providers, OpenSync has been broadly adopted by the OEM/ODM access points, consumer electronics, and has been pre-integrated and supported by leading silicon and processor platforms. And the rapidly expanding consumer-facing Smart Home Services suite powered by OpenSync and offered by Plume currently includes Adaptive WiFi, secure parental and access controls via HomePass, Plume AI Security, and Plume Motion as well as operator-facing support, operations, and marketing suites designed to enhance service delivery, visibility, and scale.

Telecom Infra Project (TIP) — one of the largest cross-functional working groups in the world with more than 500 member organizations including Facebook, leading service providers including Deutsche Telekom, technology providers, developers, chipset and device manufacturers, and integrators across the telecommunications industry — also announced earlier this week that it has adopted OpenSync as its open access point software stack, and has demonstrated compatibility with multiple controller platforms.

Key Quotes:

“Our partnership with Plume has been critical to the success of Charter’s ‘Advanced In-Home WiFi’ roll-out and has enabled Charter to accelerate innovation and more rapidly deliver new features to our Spectrum Internet and WiFi customers – from the ability to optimize their home networks to greater control over their devices. Charter has seen first-hand the technical innovation of the Plume team and is pleased to join Plume’s syndicate. I look forward to supporting the next phase of Plume’s expansion.”

– Andrew Ip

“We’ve been enthusiastic investors and committed supporters of Plume since their Series A, and are now excited to partner with these industry leaders in the journey. It has been really satisfying to be a part of this incredible growth and such a talented team.”

– Ankur Prakash, Vice President at Liberty Global Ventures and a board member of Plume

“We believe in the cloud, a massively scalable data-driven platform, a SaaS delivery model, and an open-source approach to build a market-leading, high-growth enterprise efficiently and with operating leverage. I’m hugely thankful for our people, customers, partners, and investors for helping us deliver on our promise, and honored by the confidence of our new investors and strategic partners.”

– Fahri Diner, Co-founder and CEO of Plume