EMTERIA secures a seven-digit investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds and the US investor Runa Capital to revolutionize the use of industrial operating systems in digital products

May 14, 2020

Android is the most popular OS with 2.5 billion active Android devices, available on smartphones, TVs, and even appliances. It is supported by one of the largest development communities, making it a unique tool used by consumers and businesses alike. But pure Android isn’t fitted to work in an industrial environment, where you can’t access Google Play Services, vendors’ centralized updates and have to limit the user-accessible functionality.

emteria.OS is an adapted Android operating system for business environments that solves this problem. Customers use it to build all kinds of products, including ticket scanning devices, cashier desks, ticketing machines, smart home controllers, video conferencing & alarming systems – or whatever they have in mind.

Based on the Android Open Source Project, emteria.OS enables the deployment of millions of existing Android applications on custom connected devices, simplifies software development, and significantly reduces overall production and maintenance costs. In addition, users are provided with personalized branding, security updates, and ongoing support from the emteria team. Before emteria those businesses might have already used Android apps but struggled with adapting the system to their custom needs, while some still used outdated platforms like Windows CE.

The B2B market has so far failed to leverage the Android platform at scale even though it has reached a market share of more than 70% for mobile operating systems. In the B2B environment, this development leaves much to be desired – you may find elaborately adapted Android versions that lack updates, age quickly, and in general cannot meet their full potential. Our vision is to free industrial devices from their individualized software, just like the mobile revolution.

Dr. Igor Kalkov, founder and CEO of emteria

Today, the company has over 75,000  сustomers that already run their own Android applications on emteria.OS and manage them through emteria’s remote device management system. Initially, emteria started with the Raspberry Pi support but is now focusing on industrial applications based on i.MX8, a specialized ARM processor for commercial usage.

We are very convinced of this technology’s potential in the field of industrial operating systems. The team combines technical expertise, market knowledge and a feel for the specific requirements of customers. We are pleased to be able to support emteria on its way.

Daniela Bach, Investment Manager at HTGF

The team has reached great success among the Raspberry Pi community by developing an important layer for device configuration and management not available from the open source Android. We believe that emteria will continue to attract more IoT developers. Obviously, the team itself and the community in general benefit from the flourishing ecosystem of Android developer tools and a broad spectrum of periphery hardware built to support Android out of the box.

Dmitry Galperin, Partner at Runa Capital

About Emteria
emteria GmbH offers an adapted Android platform for customer-specific products and off-the-shelf hardware. The software solution, including the entire ecosystem for device management and secure updates, is an in-house development and is all servers are hosted in Germany. With support for Raspberry Pi 3B/B+ and Raspberry Pi CM3, emteria has already convinced over 70,000 users worldwide and is currently working on support for Raspberry Pi 4, as well as for industrial hardware platforms from NXP, Qualcomm and Rockchip.

Contact
emteria GmbH
Dr. Igor Kalkov
Oppenhoffallee 9-15,
52066 Aachen, Germany
T.: +49 241 47597530
info@emteria.com

About Runa Capital
Runa Capital is an international venture capital firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA, which invests in early stage deep tech (AI, machine learning, middleware, open source, etc.), cloud business software, fintech, edutech and digital health start-ups. From 2010 to 2020 Runa Capital had three funds and invested in more than 80 companies in Europe and North America including – Nginx, MariaDB, Zopa, Brainly, drchrono, Smava and Mambu.

Contact
Runa Capital
459 Hamilton Ave, Ste. 306
Palo Alto, CA 94301 USA
T.: (650) 644 1122
info@runacap.com

About High-Tech Gründerfonds
The seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) finances technology start-ups with growth potential. With a volume of approximately 900 million euros distributed over three funds and an international partner network, the HTGF has supported almost 600 start-ups since 2005. His team of experienced investment managers and start-up experts supports the young companies with know-how, entrepreneurial spirit and passion. The focus is on high-tech start-ups in the fields of digital business models, industrial technology, life sciences, chemistry and related business areas. To date, external investors have invested more than 2.4 billion euros of capital in the HTGF portfolio in more than 1,500 follow-up financing rounds. The fund has also successfully sold shares in more than 100 companies.

Investors in the public-private partnership include the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy, KfW Capital, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and 32 companies. Our Fund Investors

Contact
High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH
Daniela Bach
Schlegelstraße 2
53113 Bonn
T.: +49 228 823 00 154
d.bach@htgf.de