[Corrected 8/3/18, 5:22 pm. See below.] Leading chipmaker and designer Arm announced today it is acquiring Silicon Valley data management company Treasure Data to complete a comprehensive platform to help customers efficiently extract and analyze data from Internet of Things devices.
Cambridge, UK-based Arm, which was acquired by SoftBank for $32 billion in 2016, unveiled its new offering called the Arm Pelion IoT Platform, whose foundation is the IoT device management and connectivity control functions Arm already provides to customers. With the addition of Mountain View, CA-based Treasure Data, the Pelion service will also help customers combine raw IoT data with other data streams and prepare it for analysis, according to Dipesh Patel, president of Arm’s IoT Services Group. [An earlier version of this paragraph misstated Arm’s acquisition price. We regret the error.]
Patel says no other company has assembled a device-to-data platform to smooth out the technical kinks and overcome the data silos that can prevent businesses from deriving insights from IoT data streams.
“This is an industry first,” Patel says.
Arm executives declined to say how much Arm is paying for Treasure Data. But Arm CMO Joyce Kim gave a hint.
“This is largest cash deal we’ve ever done,” Kim says. According to Bloomberg, the most Arm had spent to date for an acquisition was the $705.9 million it paid for Artisan Components in 2004.
Treasure Data, founded in 2011, closed a $25 million Series C fundraising round in 2016. The round, which brought its fundraising total to $54 million, was led by SBI (formerly known as SoftBank Investment) and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). Previous investors Scale Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures participated.
Arm estimates that a trillion IoT devices will be connected by 2035, and these will yield 10 trillion data streams that could yield valuable business insights. With Pelion, Arm plans to simplify the collection and delivery of all that data from a diverse population of devices, which are connected to a plethora of data centers and Web-based servers, by various means of transmission, and across multiple geographic regions.
