CCAPS vendor Plume has announced a $270 million minority investment from Insight Partners. This round of investment (Series E) values Plume at $1.35 billion and brings total equity funding to $397 million.
Plume already supports 170 CSPs with CCAPS offerings. Its HomePass suite consists of adaptive and self-optimising whole-home WiFi, AI-driven cybersecurity and IoT device protection, parental and secure access controls, and motion awareness.
This is complemented by a data-driven back-end operations platform which provides CSPs with real-time and predictive customer support tools, network control center applications, deep analytics, comprehensive dashboards, consumer behavior and satisfaction insights, churn prediction, and retention marketing services through Plume’s Haystack and Harvest suites.
Meanwhile OpenSync enables CSPs to decouple their service offerings from hardware and rapidly curate and deliver new services over a multi-vendor, open-platform architecture. This enables new services to be delivered rapidly, reduces CAPEX and extends the useful life of existing infrastructure. OpenSync currently supports more than 26 million access points and switches across a broad range of silicon SDK and CPE platforms.
“Growth in the smart home category is exploding, but the quality of consumer experience has fallen short,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Ryan Hinkle, who has been appointed as a director on Plume’s board. “We’re convinced that Plume, with its scalable cloud data platform approach, highly efficient go-to-market strategy, strong momentum, top-quartile financial performance across all SaaS KPIs – including revenue, growth rates, gross margin, efficiency and retention metrics – and world class team is transforming this category. We’re delighted to join and support this exciting journey.”
Fahri Diner, Co-founder and CEO of Plume. said that his firm addresses the disconnect between the expectations of smart spaces and the service provider’s ability to deliver flawless experiences to them. Plume will use the new funding to increase R&D investment, as well as support sales, marketing and partnerships.
Omnisperience view
This latest investment round gives Plume the resources it needs to optimise the opportunities from the fast take-up of CCAPS we anticipate in the next three years. The company recently announced a tie-up with UK multi-service operator Virgin Media (see Virgin Media rolls out CCAPS offer) and is expected to roll out its offering to other properties in the Liberty Global Group, which is an investor through its investment arm Liberty Global Ventures. Plume has also recently announced a partnership with CCAPS cybersecurity specialist Akamai, which rounds out the range of security features it can offer to customers. Its substantial war chest means it’s now well positioned to grow its market while continuing to expand its offering with either organic development or M&A.
On this latter note, Omnisperience expects to see a wave of M&A later in 2021 and through 2022 as smaller CCAPS vendors with specialist capabilities are snapped up.
The valuation of Plume at $1.35 billion makes it the first CCAPS unicorn.
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