Fleet, a startup offering a service that helps to track and manage enterprise devices like laptops, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by CRV with participation from angel investors including GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. The new capital will be put toward scaling the team and building a complete device management system.
The job of managing employee devices was even more difficult because of the Pandemic. According to a recent survey commissioned by device management platform Kandji, 95 percent of IT professionals say remote troubleshooting, onboarding and security are obstacles to success. According to a separate poll, the vast majority of organizations believe they don't have an effective device management system.
Fleet aims to address common pain points with avisibility platform that manages not only laptops but computing infrastructure, such as internet of things. The company's product acts as a source of truth for device data, allowing teams to see the health of a laptop battery, for example, or whether a file unexpectedly changed on a production server.
TheFleet lets teams ask questions about their devices and get answers. They are stuck with maintenance. Fleet allows teams to build their own security and IT solutions.
The open source project that led to Fleet was created by the CTO and partner of Moonfire. He was a software engineer on the security team at Meta and co-founded two companies before moving to Fleet. Prior to joining Meta, she was the leader of software development teams at Etsy.
Osquery was developed by Arpaia and Wasserman at Meta to improve the internal operating system of the social network. The three used a version of Osquery adapted for enterprise settings. The attention of the management shifted from Fleet to its separate, user-focused software-as-a-service offering.
After leaving Kolide, Wasserman continued as lead maintainer for Fleet and collaborated with McNeil to create a new company called Fleet Device Management, Inc.
Fleet has a control panel.
Fleet allows users to send snapshots of device data to other platforms. When an unlicensed app or extension is installed on a laptop, Fleet can monitor for a range of environment changes.
The source code of Fleet is publicly available on the internet, including the paid features in the fully managed plan.
If a team needs a change, they can request a feature or they can just make the change themselves and try it out, then submit a pull request to share the code with other users.
Fleet has competitors in Balena and Particle, which specialize in enterprise-scale Internet of Things device management. The company competes with security-centered device management platforms, like Axonius, which recently raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Tech giants like Apple and Google offer their own solutions, but it should be noted that they are confined to their respective operating systems and hardware.
According to Markets and Markets, the mobile device management market will grow from $5.5 billion in 20221 to $20.4 billion by 2026. Markets and Markets predicts that the open source services market will grow to $50 billion by the year 2020.
The size of Fleet's user base is evidence of the company's success in the face of rivals. Some of the devices under management are from customers.
Fleet's feature set is unique, but it works well to fill holes in mobile device management solutions like Jamf. The platform is a single, authoritative, developer-friendly source of truth for all device data.
Fleet has raised $25 million. The company hopes to double the number of employees to 40 by the year 2023.
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