Let’s play a game. Pick up your laptop and turn it on its side. You see a few connectors, right? But where’s the Ethernet port? Or, if you’re a few years younger than me, you may even ask “what’s Ethernet?”
As we have become more mobile, so has our dependency on the wireless network. And these days, many people’s first question on arriving at a hotel, retailer, or employer is “what’s the WiFi password?” WiFi has become more important than your father’s dial-tone in the 80s and 90s.
And yet, despite our dependency on the WiFi network, it hasn’t changed much in over a decade. If anything, as the number of Wifi connected devices has multiplied due to the Internet of Things as well as the simple fact that people now carry multiple devices around, the network has become more brittle, overloaded, and slow.
The last companies to take a legitimate shot at rethinking enterprise WiFi were Meraki Networks, Ruckus Wireless and Aerohive which were born between 2004 and 2006… well before the first iPhone was shipped and before Amazon had publicly launched their AWS cloud service. Meraki was the first startup to use the cloud for configuration and management at scale and built the world’s first cloud-based WiFi company. This strategy proved quite valuable and Cisco snapped up Meraki for a cool $1.2B in 2014. Further highlighting the strategic importance of the WiFi market, HP bought Aruba for $3B in 2015 and Brocade just bought Ruckus Wireless for $1.5B in April 2016. The net result? The market is wide open and screaming for a new innovator.
Enter Mist Systems.
The $6B (and growing) enterprise wireless space is complex and nuanced. Building a reliable, scalable, and performant wireless technology requires deep engineering chops as well as a bit of black magic. Mist has assembled the dream team to take a fresh look at this space.
Bob Friday, Mist’s co-founder and CTO is a pioneer in the wireless space. For over 30 years, he has invented, patented and delivered new products that have made our lives more mobile. At Metricom in the 90s, Bob’s inventions powered one of the nation’s first wireless networks. Later, Bob was Chief Scientist at Airespace, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005 for $450M and became the foundation of Cisco’s wireless product line. Bob quickly rose to CTO of Cisco’s enterprise wireless group where he met Sujai Hajela, who had been tapped to lead Cisco’s (at the time) $1B enterprise wireless business as VP/GM. Together, Sujai and Bob more than doubled Cisco’s wireless revenues and increased Cisco’s market share in a few short years.
Sujai and Bob are exactly what we look for in founding teams. They have deep experience in a large, growing market, a long history of working and innovating together, and complementary skills with Bob as the technical heart and soul of the company and Sujai driving the business.
When they were getting Mist off the ground in 2014, Sujai and Bob asked themselves “with a clean slate, what would we do differently?” Their first major decision was to build a cloud-first, microservices based architecture that leverages modern building blocks like Docker, Kafka, and Spark. They also decided that location, analytics and machine learning would play a first-class role in their product. The result (which recently shipped) is a combination of hardware access points and sensors that pair with a set of scalable cloud services to deliver amazing mobile experiences for users and administrators.
What Mist has built is unique. Mist has created the industry’s first solution that has a real-time feedback loop between access points and sensors and the cloud. The Mist Network continuously streams data from its hardware to the cloud, analyzes this data in real-time and pro-actively adjusts the network to deliver better performance, stability and user experiences. Even more interesting, Mist’s hardware sensors emulate the features and functionality of location beacons (such as iBeacons and Google EddyStone) without the need to manage, configure and deploy hundreds or thousands of individual hardware beacons.
The result is a network that effectively fixes itself while delivering unprecedented insights into users, devices, and location behaviors. And, as with any modern software stack, the Mist cloud exposes a set of APIs, enabling third party developers to create a new set of applications and experiences that have been until now impossible.
Although the company is only 18 months old, the team has been executing at breakneck speed. Mist recently announced $14.4M in Series A funding from Lightspeed and Norwest Venture Partners and the company is already in commercial deployment or pilots today at more than 50 of the world’s largest retailers, higher education schools, manufacturers, healthcare companies, corporate enterprises and managed service providers.
The team is just getting started and at Lightspeed we’re extremely excited about our partnership with the Mist team as they rethink the enterprise wireless space and bring the power of the cloud and big data analytics to build the industry’s first experience-driven network. For more information on Mist, visit www.mist.com.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He brings significant cloud, mobile and analytics expertise to the Mist Board of Directors. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Arif worked in the Corporate Business Development group at Cisco Systems. Earlier in his career, Arif worked in technical development and product management roles at WebTV (acquired by MSFT), Andes Networks (acquired by SUNW), and Sun Microsystems.
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