Singapore-based massive Internet of Things (IoT) service provider UnaBiz has raised over $25 million in its Series B funding round led by SPARX Group.
The round was oversubscribed, with participation from CDIB, G K Goh, and Thaioil, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The funding brings UnaBiz’s total capital raised to $35 million since it launched in July 2016, and has more than tripled the firm’s valuation since the last round.
The fresh funds will be used to strengthen the scaleup’s foothold in strategic regions such as Japan, Southeast Asia, and EMEA via local offices and M&A operations, and to sustain the growth trajectory of UnaConnect, the company’s latest data platform offering that aims to bridge the glaring gap between fragmented IoT data collection technologies and enterprise systems, the company said.
“Our vision is to accelerate corporate digital transformation with optimized end-to-end solutions which include hardware, software, and connectivity. We look forward to growing our team in each area and working with vertical experts to champion a unified Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) world,” said Unabiz Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Henri Bong. “The IoT industry has become too fragmented and it is our mission to simplify it and eradicate frictions to truly enable massive IoT, from 0G to 5G.”
In 2018, UnaBiz raised over $10 million in its Series A funding round.
Leveraging Taiwan’s solutions design, industrialization and supply chain ecosystem, and Singapore’s innovation platform, the company said it has made remarkable strides in three major industries; water and gas metering, asset tracking, and facilities management.
Consequently, UnaBiz has been servicing Japan’s largest remote gas meter reading infrastructure, the largest autonomous tracked beer kegs fleet in Australia and New Zealand, and one of the most ambitious integrated facility
management projects for an educational institution in Singapore.
SPARX Group, an independent investment company, based in Tokyo, Japan, that manages over $15 billion worth of assets, led the round through the Mirai Creation Fund II, a $700 million fund backed by the likes of Toyota Motor Corporation and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
SPARX Mirai Creation Funds aim to accelerate the pace of innovation by financing companies’ and projects’ development in technologies that will drive future growth. SPARX Group is listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange.
“UnaBiz has made tremendous progress in the past year. We are impressed by its rapid and sustained growth, especially how it delivered one of the largest and fastest smart gas metering projects in the region, despite the
COVID-19 pandemic. We look forward to partnering with this talented and dynamic team to meet the growing needs of a burgeoning IoT landscape,” SPARX Group President and CEO Shuhei Abe said.
Global Brain, who led the previous round through KDDI Open Innovation Fund, and ENGIE Ventures, the investment arm of global energy and services leader, ENGIE, have reaffirmed their confidence in UnaBiz’s vision in its Series B round.
CDIB Capital Growth Partners, a fund managed by CDIB Capital Group, a Taiwan-based venture and private equity firm, also participated in the round. CDIB Capital Group is one of the largest and longest-standing merchant banking groups in Asia, with approximately $2.5 billion in assets.
G. K. Goh Holdings, a Singapore-based investment company owning operating businesses as well as a diverse investment portfolio of listed equities, unlisted equities, and third-party managed funds, also participated in the round.
TOP Ventures, the investment arm of Thai Oil Public Company Limited (TOP), Thailand’s largest Oil & Gas company under the PTT Group, followed the round to bring existing massive-IoT solutions developed by UnaBiz to the Thai market.
The latest fundraising comes three months after UnaBiz announced its new Japan office through Invest Tokyo, a program initiated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and supported by Japan External Trade Organisation.
UnaBiz was recently selected for an accelerator program in Japan under the Global Innovation Alliance, an initiative of Enterprise Singapore and Singapore Economic Development Board, run by Leave a Nest Singapore.
Featured image credit: UnaBiz