Amazon Buys Internet of Things Startup 2lemetry

Amazon.com acquired 2lemetry, an Internet of Things (IoT) startup, for an undisclosed price earlier this week.

Though Amazon has not disclosed details of the deal, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson has confirmed the acquisition in an e-mail exchange with TechCrunch, who first reported the story.

2lemetry is an IoT middleware provider whose service, in their words, “acts as an IoT version of Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) middleware solutions.” In plain English: 2lemetry provides a tool to work with the huge data numbers that come from a network of connected devices, such as pressure monitors on oil and gas equipment or connected thermostats on refrigerated trains or trucks. 2lemetry takes the data from those devices, makes it readable, and provides analytics and predictive reports based on that data.

2lemetry currently works with customers in a range of industries, including transportation, manufacturing, oil and gas, and mining. Notable customers include Honeywell, Demeter Power Group, and Arrow Electronics.

Since their launch in 2011, 2lemetry has raised $9 million, including $4 million in funding from Salesforce this January.

From our POV, the acquisition looks like an effort to build an IoT strategy, and could help Amazon build an early advantage over their major cloud competitors Microsoft and Google. Amazon may be interested in using 2lemetry’s services to build out for their AWS Kinesis service for connected devices. Kinesis a cloud-based service that allows real-time processing of large, distributed data sources. According to AWS, Kinesis can capture and store terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, which, combined with 2lemetry’s services, would make it ideal for capturing the massive amounts of data generated by large networks of connected devices.

In a statement on their website, a 2lemetry representative wrote: “our existing service has not changed, and with Amazon we will offer our same customer support. We still have the same name and branding as before.”