Where we came from

In 2012 Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster), Sean Carey and I were chatting about the “Internet of Things” and how exciting the potential world of everything being connected would be. It seemed like the promise and the buzz was building, and soon everything everywhere would be online and humanity would be saved. Or something like that.

Sean, Shawn & I at Moffett Field (NASA)

We began poking around to see what it would look like to build a connected “thing” and what the development experience entailed. We had experience in building and selling software companies and assumed we could apply the same rapid development, prototyping, continuous iteration type methodology we had used, leveraging mature software stacks that allowed us to focus on our end applications. We soon discovered that unlike software, the world of sensors, hardware, radio modules, connectivity, and routing data required piecing together foundational layers and navigating through a confusing mess of transports and protocols.

When friends and peers told us everyone in this market struggled with similar challenges, we quickly recognized a massive opportunity. If we delivered a simpler experience for developers connecting devices to the internet we would unleash a massive market of connected devices.

We soon discovered that unlike software, the world of sensors, hardware, radio modules, connectivity, and routing data required piecing together foundational layers and navigating through a confusing mess of transports and protocols.

We secured funding with investors who believed in our mission including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Khosla Ventures, FirstMark, and others and started driving toward our mission to give people, communities, and enterprises the power to effortlessly connect machines to the internet to make the world smarter and more aware.

Why our mission hasn’t changed

We discovered the challenges and complexity we initially experienced had actually become worse as time went on, and the IoT hype train gained momentum. New companies had popped up pushing their standards, and different business models had emerged such as vendors forcing their customers to use proprietary chips, but claiming their connection is open. The result? Confusion still reigned supreme for companies trying to address simple use cases which involved connecting devices to the internet.

After spending some time building an end-to-end IoT solution, thinking that it would be a faster way to market (we were really wrong about that one), we dove back into the fray and delivered v1 of the Helium platform; an out of the box solution that simplified the process of connecting devices to the internet that’s available today .

The difficulties were well known to us because we’d been there, and we’d eliminated the complexity by delivering a software, hardware, and cloud services platform that enables companies to focus on developing applications for their specific use cases. While many customers marvel at the range (miles), battery life (years), what they don’t necessarily “see” is the underlying security, encryption, connection protocols, provisioning mechanisms, and cloud connectors. It just works, which is exactly the way we have designed it.

A new approach is needed

While we’re proud of our v1 product, we felt that centralized connectivity was a bigger problem we had still not addressed. If anything, we might have been making it worse by adding yet another proprietary solution into the mix. Connectivity is critical and a key obstacle preventing the IoT promise becoming a reality. Industry experts agree. We know from our own experience, and customers driven to our v1 solution, that this connectivity conundrum remains very real and pervasive.

Connectivity is critical and a key obstacle preventing the IoT promise becoming a reality. Industry experts agree.

Connectivity options today are less than ideal: Wi-Fi introduces complexity, and only provides limited range. Range requirements often rule out technologies such as Bluetooth. For wide coverage, cellular seems like a viable option were it not burdened by the high cost per device, and its power hungry nature. Category M1 and NB-IoT didn’t provide as much of a solution for low power devices as I think anyone hoped, and the newer-breed of LPWAN providers face a wide-range of technical and economic challenges. In addition, cellular companies are large, public, centralized organizations and by their nature focus on maximizing return on capital investments for shareholders. That means serving a market consuming more data per devices, and charging more for that data (think 5G and the inevitable increased data needs for 4K, AR, VR, etc). Issues with centralized organizations in terms of focus, cost, and ownership related to coverage are embedded in their nature.

Different companies have chosen different approaches to this connectivity conundrum. Some try to raise large amounts of funding in an attempt to build their own infrastructure. This is costly, will take a long time, and has been tried before and failed. Even if successful, it would ultimately just become another centralized network.

Joining a centralized network, or attempting to build one which dictates cost and coverage, repeats many mistakes of the past and the fundamental economics have proven to be unsuccessful when applied to a high number of devices with low data needs.

Newer IoT-focused technology and network providers claim to be open for connection on one hand, but on the other force companies to use their proprietary hardware or modulation schemes. This highlights another key challenge why the IoT has stalled: future-proofing a solution. Organizations want to ensure devices in the field can be serviced and supported for years without worrying whether the parent company will still exist.