I am incredibly stoked to share with you today that Afero has closed its Series C round of investment, led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. We are also very excited to announce that Crosspoint's Dr. Hugh Thompson will join the Afero Board of Directors as part of this investment.
Afero's vision came from realizing that the next wave of Internet connected products could not be done using the same approaches as securing traditional computing devices. Most things that we want to connect don't look or act at all like a computer. Most things are designed, made, and used by humans who are not familiar with cybersecurity or even computer technology.
With this realization, Afero was founded to create a comprehensive platform to make it easy for all manufacturers, developers, and end users to design, build, and use these new connected products with secure connectivity automatically built in.
To give you an idea of the size we are talking about, Statista reports that the IoT market is expected to grow to $1.6 Trillion by 2025. For comparison, the global smartphone market is anticipated to grow to only $493 Billion by 2026.
In this next wave of exponential growth for the Internet, tens of billions of new products that are not traditional computers or smartphones will connect. Unless we are careful, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) at scale will create an unprecedented cybersecurity attack surface.
This deluge of low (or no) compute power devices connected to the Internet naturally leads to intense interest in the data that they generate and consume. The data represents incredibly valuable usage signals that can be used directly or to train/inform AI and machine learning.
We at Afero believe the big challenge is to make sure that manufacturers and developers have the right tools to make products that are safe and secure for everyone. Packaging these tools the right way is also part of the challenge: they need to speak the "languages" of the manufacturer, developer, and user. That is, they have to be built so that these stakeholders can thrive and succeed at whatever they want to do, without forcing them to become security and connectivity experts.
We all want this, whether we realize it yet or not. Just ask anyone who has been a victim of cybercrime.
Afero has taken a holistic approach to this challenge. We provide a turnkey and extensible software platform that incorporates supply chain security, device attestation and authentication, transport independence, embedded firmware, a mobile application SDK, and a scalable and portable modern cloud service.
This is hard stuff. It spans multiple complex disciplines, and for any kind of product development you can think of. Afero has an unusual set of skills and experiences, with a team of passionate technologists who have known each other and worked together since the early 1990s at companies like Apple, WebTV, Danger, Microsoft, Android, Google and other leading platform companies.
The Afero platform does all of this at scale today. Our current customers use Afero to provide trusted, secure connections for their mass-produced products, from smart home devices to COVID-19 tests. We're just getting started, though. This investment is about the growth and expansion of the Afero platform offering across all kinds of products. By doing this, we pull out friction for everyone and get to a future that is not only useful but also trustworthy.
The Crosspoint team's deep cybersecurity sector knowledge had led them to a similar conclusion. Their expertise makes them a great partner for the Afero mission, and we look forward to working together on this challenge, which will arguably touch the lives of everyone who uses the Internet.