Bangalore, August 22, 2017: China-based hardware accelerator ‘HAX’ and India-based ‘Applied Singularity’, one of the largest meetup community for Internet of Things (IoT) globally, recently released the annual Hardware Trends Report 2017 in India.
The report talks of how the IoT industry is coming of age. Top hardware companies like FitBit, GoPro and DJI Drones are around a decade old now. Software giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are either building their own hardware or buying hardware startups, and driving adoption of platforms that facilitate the easy use of connected devices. Various industries, from construction to insurance, have been adapting to this maturing space – largely driven by the efficiency improvements and data generation that connected hardware is making possible.
According to Nihal Kashinath, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Singularity, “In 2015-16, innovation in connected hardware far outpaced adoption. 2017 looks like the year when adoption will start catching up in a big way, even though innovation continues to accelerate.” With machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence also starting to see increased usage, hardware’s importance is growing even faster as it serves as a critical tool (and sometimes the only tool) for data acquisition for AI.
The Hardware Trends Report 2017 analyses the latest developments in key industry segments like consumer, healthcare, enterprise, and industry. It also identifies significant movements in areas such as investments, grassroots growth, and hardware focus in different countries.
Excerpts and insights from the report:
Health tech has seen startups and companies make bold moves, shifting focus from wellness devices like activity trackers to medical-grade devices and solutions, such as wearables and implantables. By using devices instead of medication to treat ailments and using device-generated data to create more personalized treatments, the competition is now with the pharmaceutical industry. Privacy of data remains an issue though, and there are significant challenges in acquiring and ethically making big data accessible to health tech companies who can use it to build radically better solutions. “Donating your data might help more than donating an organ,” said Duncan Turner, Managing Director, HAX Seed. Smart medical devices have gained interest from investors, and startups like Ray Baby and Diabeto are among the few Indian health tech startups who raised funds this year from HAX.
The report also highlight that Enterprise IoT is growing faster than Consumer IoT. While consumers are adopting more and more hardware solutions, as evidenced through increasing crowdfunding support, enterprises are discovering significant value in sectors such as Mining, Agri Tech, Logistics, Utilities, Retail and Building Management through augmenting processes, tracking physical assets, predicting maintenance and managing resources. The connected mining industry is expected to reach $10 billion by 2020.
Agri Tech would also see increasing valuations globally as it scales up to meet the rising food demand of the growing global population. Using advanced sensors, solutions are optimizing the use of water and fertilizer, avoiding spoilage of crops, monitoring livestock, and improving the selective breeding of animals. Industries are seeing tremendous automation with robots joining the workforce leading to the rise of “Dark Factories”. Many startups are now focusing on Enterprise IoT solutions, but the sales cycle is longer and more challenging than in the B2C space. Cyril Ebersweiler, Founder & Managing Director, HAX observes, “To grow in the enterprise it can be essential to be public. When a contract is $1 million it is not a joke anymore; clients make reference calls”.
The number of hardware startups with over $100 million funding quadrupled since 2014 from 8 to 35. 18 hardware startups have emerged as unicorns. While Venture Capital (VC) has been the main source of funds, alternatives to VC funding are gaining popularity – hardware startups are increasingly turning to early IPOs as micro-caps, reverse mergers for faster listing, and the newly unveiled Regulation A+ from the US Benjamin Joffe, Partner, HAX says, “Both public and private investors are attracted to the technology and revenue of hardware startups. The number of hardware unicorns is already half of what the world’s total – including software – was in 2013.”
The substantial growth in the industry makes it critical to promote, grow and nurture the ecosystem. In India, the ecosystem for IoT & AI is flouring at grassroot levels, which makes India a bright spot for IoT & AI, along with China and the USA. The Indian ecosystem, companies and governments are coming together to increase momentum and create new opportunities in the space. The report highlights that there has been consistent grass-roots level growth of hardware communities across the world. India-based Applied Singularity (previously known as IoTBLR) has been recognized as the largest hardware/IoT meetup globally for the second year in a row, and is followed by similar communities in London, San Francisco, Paris and New York, who work actively towards upskilling and nurturing the ecosystem.
For the full report, visit https://hax.co/hardware-trends/
Image Credit: Hax