Dear Sense Customers and Partners,
Today we announced the close of our series B funding round. We raised $18M in this round, bringing our total funding to date to a bit over $38M.
As those of you who have been involved in venture-backed companies know, this is an important milestone and also an important vote of confidence in the company – and this is based on all the great help and feedback from all of our users, so thank you!
It is also the case that it is very important for companies like Sense to have investors who are aligned with the mission and goals of the company. We are very fortunate to have a great set of investors. This funding round was led by Schneider Electric and included participation from our existing investors including Shell Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Prelude Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, and iRobot. Prelude and Capricorn are venture groups with a strong focus on climate change (so care about the energy and carbon reduction potential of Sense). Shell, iRobot, and Energy Impact Partners are companies (or venture groups funded by companies) who care about the evolution of the smart home and future energy systems. And now Schneider adds to this as a major provider of electrical equipment throughout the world. We’ve gotten to know the Schneider teams very well in the process of pulling the funding together and have been impressed by the vision and commitment to the future of intelligent energy systems in homes and buildings.
Given this strong alignment with the goals of Sense, this means the new round of funding is going towards continuing to do what we do. Since our last funding round in August 2016, we have more than doubled the size of the company, increased our user base by more than 50x, increased device coverage by a factor of 3, and delivered over 20 app releases. With this new funding round, we plan to continue these trends. As you probably know, we constantly update models and software based on ongoing improvements, so you should continue to benefit from this progress.
We have a number of new features coming including continued improvement to device and power coverage, additional integrations with other smart home devices, and a number of new application features to expand the ability for Sense to help you manage energy and know what’s going on in your home.
All of this is based on filling real needs of our end users, so it is great to have such involved customers. All of the feedback we get from you is super helpful – please keep it coming!
Thank you for your support,
Mike
CEO of Sense