Charter Communications, Qualcomm Ventures, Belkin and Service Electric Cablevision are among those taking part in a $85 million (€78 million) financing of smart home services pioneer Plume.
The transaction includes $60 million in in Series D preferred equity and $25 million in debt financing. It brings Plume’s total amount of equity financing to $127 million. The four took 75% of the funding between them with existing investors Liberty Global and Shaw Communications also participating.
Plume provides a Consumer Experience Management (CEM) platform as a cloud SaaS offering. It has already been 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 enables the curation, delivery, support, and management of personalized Smart Home Services for consumers.
The Smart Home Services category is a primary growth vector for forward-looking service providers looking to differentiate broadband offerings while improving customer retention.
“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,” said Ip. “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.”
“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,” said Ankur Prakash, Vice President at Liberty Global Ventures and a board member of Plume. “It has been really satisfying to be a part of this incredible growth and such a talented team.”
Over 650 million devices communicate with 16 million OpenSync switches across 14 million household. Plume’s cloud controller operates the largest software-defined network in the world.
