Android device and deployment application management company Esper announced a $7.6 million Series A funding round. According to the company, the funding will help it provide a full stack development and management platform for Android edge devices.
Esper explained that the overall edge market is growing 26% annually with more than 7 million developers worldwide working on applications for Android edge devices such as tablets, kiosks, point-of-sale, and mobile payment devices. By 2024 it is expected that there will be over 200 million Android devices deployed in the dedicated device space.
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“This market is growing quickly as consumers and employees rely on these devices to get specific jobs done. Right now these fleets of devices are relying on home grown solutions for updating and maintaining which doesn’t scale,” Yadhu Gopalan, the CEO of Esper, told SD Times. “Esper is a modern approach to developing and deploying these apps.”
Esper aims to provide a platform for the creation, deployment, updating, and monitoring of remote smart touch-screen devices and their associated applications and firmware.
“With real-time monitoring and staged and fine-grained control of deployments to a large fleet of edge devices customers can iterate and scale their device fleet faster,” Gopalan said. “By automating many of the common monitoring scenarios we also allow customers to reduce their operational overhead.”
In addition to its application and operating system updates and device and fleet management solutions, Esper allows for secure/authenticated real-time diagnosis and debugging of the remote device.
“We understand environmental and site-specific issues during deployment and want to fully support developers,” Gopalan said. “All of the core functionality of Esper can be performed by a cloud-based dashboard or through APIs/CLI.”
Engineering and operations teams can use Esper to increase business agility, automate previously manual processes using telemetry for analytics, alerts, and actions to increase fleet uptime and reliability, diagnose deployed applications and devices in real-time, and reduce the resources needed to intelligently deploy and scale device fleets, Gopalan explained.
Gopalan said that the company also plans on adding more integration with third-party back-end tooling.
Also, with Esper Enhanced Android, the platform can seamlessly enroll and manage devices to achieve no-touch drop-ship directly from the factory to deployment sites and addresses the challenge of receiving and managing timely Android system updates for increased security and uptime.
