DevOps Platform Esper Announces $60 Million Series C funding as Market Demand Explodes

India and US based Esper, the industry’s leading DevOps platform for devices, today announced $60 million in Series C funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors including Scale Venture Partners, Madrona Ventures and Root Ventures. The investment brings Esper’s total funding to $100 million and follows the company’s $30 million Series B just four month ago in May 2021. Esper developed the industry’s first DevOps platform for intelligent edge devices and was named one of the top 10 hottest startups in 2021 by CRN.

Enterprise edge devices is a fast-growing category that includes everything from the tablets used in travel, restaurants, and warehouses, to medical devices, fitness equipment, and in-store kiosks. Esper is the only software platform that lets organizations remotely scale, manage, secure, and update mission-critical edge devices and custom apps using the proven DevOps practices now considered standard in web app development.

There is a massive potential for Indian organisations to adopt Android DevOps across sectors including hospitality, restaurant, healthcare, education, and logistics sectors to deliver contactless services. Esper works with some of the major brands including cult.fit, Teach for India to power and manage their devices.

“India witnessed unprecedented digital transformation since the pandemic, which makes it a unique market with the potential to adopt DevOps across every industry. Android DevOps has the potential to transform Indian businesses through their journey towards agility, increase operational efficiency and control costs,”says Yadhu Gopalan, CEO and co-founder at Esper.

“Esper’s team in India is pivotal to the company’s growth. Currently 83 employees work out of India and are responsible for designing and engineering Esper’s core DevOps platform along with tackling the core marketing and sales functions. We plan to increase the employee count to 200 by 2022 as we are looking to expand the Engineering and Sales functions,” said Shiv Sundar, COO & co-founder at Esper.

“Customer expectations are higher than ever. When a point of sale terminal in a retailer is out of order, the merchant doesn’t have the time or expertise to fix it. These devices are mission critical and expected to work flawlessly 24/7. This is especially true for devices directly tied to revenue generation or in verticals like medical devices where a life might literally be on the line. We built Esper with the customer’s customer in mind,” Yadhu Gopalan further adds.

Edge devices are a new path to connecting with more customers in more places, but challenges persist.

“For years now we’ve seen these massive projections about IOT devices of all kinds. But on the ground, enterprises and SMBs are struggling with the reality that large-scale deployments of devices are hard and expensive when you go it alone,” said Philine Huizing, Vice President at Insight Partners. “Esper has emerged as the only platform that provides modern DevOps capabilities in a package purpose built for intelligent edge devices. And even better, developers tell us that they love using Esper.”

Esper has over 200 paying customers and over 2,000 developers using its platform for product development. Esper addresses verticals as diverse as fast food, healthcare, connected fitness, retail, and digital signage, driving 2021 revenue 4x higher than the year prior and making Esper one of the fastest growing startups in the enterprise software sector. The Seattle-based company quadrupled headcount during 2021 and tripled its office footprint in Bellevue on a square footage basis.

As this hyper-growth attests, innovative brands are using Esper to move from whiteboard to deployment faster than they ever thought possible. This is particularly important in markets like healthcare where ease-of-use and continuous uptime are critical: 

“With Esper, our remote patient monitoring service just works,” said Neema Moraveji, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Spire Health. “Esper’s seamless deployment ensures that even patients who are not as comfortable with technology can successfully use our service. Device set-up is simple, there is zero configuration needed by the patients, and Esper’s full-service solution detects connectivity and sensor failures ahead of time and alerts the Spire team for proactive outreach to our patients, often before they even notice an issue.”

This latest funding round will primarily be used to further expand Esper’s ability to get in front of more enterprise customers.

“Our biggest opportunity right now is getting the word out to more enterprises that Esper exists,”adds Shiv Sundar. “No other software does what we do. Our customers tell us that we are completely resetting their assumptions about what is possible. It’s truly rewarding to see the light bulb go off when a customer realizes all of the infrastructure they no longer have to build themselves.”