Thanks to 5G and the availability of other connectivity options, the number of IoT devices in use around the globe is expected to multiply to 25.44 billion by 2030. Industries from healthcare to manufacturing, financial services, transportation and beyond are turning to sensors, wearables and other connected devices to capture data, power analytics and artificial intelligence, and automate business processes.
However, while there is immense potential for IoT to be applied to solve humongous industrial, business and world issues, not every organization has the necessary bench strength of engineering or understanding of this technology to apply IoT to solve real-world business problems.
Throughout his career spent at technology companies like Google, Nest, Particle and WeWork, Jonathan Beri felt the pain of trying to connect sensors to the web. That struggle inspired him to found Golioth, an IoT platform for modern development teams that aims to eliminate the pain of building connected devices by making IoT data and experiences accessible and useful.
“I began to wonder why we needed to recreate the wheel each time we set out to solve nasty, hard, challenging IoT problems,” says Beri. “We don’t invent a new database every time we have a data problem. So why are we still doing this with IoT infrastructure?”
Beri also recognized that if this was a challenge for companies like Nest, a company stocked with world-class engineering talent, it had to be an even bigger issue for businesses that do not hail from the technology world.
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“How can we expect a manufacturer or agricultural producer or a power company to understand how to apply IoT to become more efficient, to improve crop irrigation or to reduce truck rolls? That’s way outside of their core competency. At the end of the day, they just want X to connect to Y to connect to Z. And, how do you do that without wasting time? That’s precisely the reason we created Golioth.”
Golioth is a device-first, cloud platform designed to help modern engineering teams streamline IoT development—from prototype to production at scale. As a universal connector for all devices, Golioth’s hardware-agnostic device software development kit (SDK) allows a developer, without in-depth IoT expertise, to build an IoT solution on their preferred stack, securely connect and sync device data to the Cloud, collect and analyze device status data, and manage the thousands of devices, all from a single console.
Beri shares a real-world example from one of Golioth’s customers, a recycling firm looking to leverage IoT to convert legacy waste bins into data-driven devices. Before finding Golioth, the company had a team of developers dedicated to building and maintaining a proprietary IoT infrastructure to make that vision a reality.
After adopting Golioth, the company was able to eliminate the need to build and maintain its own proprietary software and focus its resources on building a differentiated blueprint that set apart its legacy bins and smart bins.
“They don’t need to worry about the infrastructure anymore. Thanks to Golioth, that has just faded away into the background. The company’s developers can sort between their past gen and their future gen products and can focus their valuable time on improving the capability of the product itself,” says Beri.
That said, some of Golioth’s best customers today are not traditional businesses but rather, software development shops, that have been tasked by industry to find creative IoT solutions to their problems. Golioth has proved to be a powerful prototyping platform for these development firms, allowing them to produce polished working prototypes, focus their team’s attention on business logic, build solid business and investment cases, hand off concepts to designers faster, and ultimately deliver more value to their clients. Development firms have the option of being a Golioth content or prototyping partner.
To showcase its platform in action and to quick-start developers on the platform, Golioth publishes reference designs designed around a variety of use cases, for instance, a trashcan monitor that measures the height of a can, an air quality monitor that assesses the quality airflow in a workplace, and a cold chain tracker to monitor the temperature of goods in transit. “We’re like the skeleton layer,” says Beri. “Developers can pick up that reference design for free and focus their talent on customizing it -- to put flesh on the bones, so to speak.”
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Golioth joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab as part of its Fall Batch 8 cohort, after being referred to the Lab by fellow startup Memfault.
“This entire industry is highly networked,” says Beri. Jim Brisimitzis and the 5G OIL team have been wonderful connectors for us. “It’s still early days in our relationship with the Lab, but we’re so excited about the doors opening for us, and the Lab’s new focus on helping CSPs monetize edge computing and innovation for enterprises. That’s right in Golioth’s wheelhouse. This shouldn’t take hundreds of engineers and years to figure out. It’s about simplifying the connectivity challenge, and that’s exactly the problem we’re solving.”
Posted April 22, 2024