Tokyo, Japan - October 16, 2017
Yokogawa Electric Corporation announces that it has participated in the Series B round of funding for FogHorn Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley startup that is a leading developer of fog computing technology.
FogHorn Systems, a pioneer in the development of software for fog computing* applications with outstanding expertise in this field, has attracted the interest of various companies that are promoting IoT. Led by Intel Capital and Saudi Aramco Ventures, this second round of financing has succeeded in raising $30 million from multiple investors. Including Yokogawa, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, and Darling Ventures, all the companies that participated in Round A have also invested in this second round, and they were joined for the first time in Round B by Honeywell Ventures. Yokogawa's Round B investment approximately amounted to $430,000, bringing its total investment to around $1.33 million.
Yokogawa offers a wide range of control solutions that help its customers improve the safety and efficiency of their operations and make the most effective use of their assets. These solutions include field instruments, control systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and management information systems. Industrial IoT (IIoT) technology is making rapid inroads in the control field, and it is expected that fog computing's enabling of real-time and distributed processing in edge computing applications will significantly accelerate its adoption. By investing in FogHorn Systems, Yokogawa has been able to work with this company to improve the ease of use of the fog computing technology. Through this investment, Yokogawa aims to accelerate its efforts in this area and thereby strengthen the solutions that it provides.
* Fog computing
An architectural concept for the realization of edge intelligence and the suppression of communications with the cloud by establishing a "fog" distributed computing layer between the cloud and devices in the field. Fog computing eliminates communications delays and fluctuations by locating the processing of certain data near the field devices that generate the data and sending only essential information to the cloud. Also, fog computing can enable the execution of logic functions for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and like at the edge of a computer network. As such, there are high expectations that this technology will lead to a number of new IoT applications.
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