FlowForge Raises $7.2M Seed Round From Cota Capital and Open Core Ventures to Solve the Challenges of IT/OT Convergence

SAN FRANCISCO, November 3, 2022 (Newswire.com) - ALL REMOTE — FlowForge, an open-source PaaS for IoT, today announced $7.2 million in seed funding. The round was led by Cota Capital with participation from Westwave Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Open Core Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by GitLab Founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij. 

Organizations transitioning to industry 4.0 are struggling to gain significant operational and financial benefits due to the gaps that exist between their operational OT and IT. As digital transformation efforts continue and the number of IoT and IIoT devices, manufacturers, and protocols for connectivity continue to increase exponentially, integrating and harmonizing OT and IT is becoming more and more critical. 

To achieve IT/OT convergence, most organizations today follow a walled-garden approach that requires expensive development resources and limits what their developers are able to do. FlowForge provides an alternative way to solve this problem with an open-source low-code platform. 

"Our mission is to help all engineers break free from walled gardens and empower them to build applications for the physical world, not just web applications," said Zeger-Jan van de Weg, CEO and co-founder of FlowForge. "By embracing an open-source and low-code approach, developers gain more flexibility and organizations can converge their IT and OT systems together with less development resources."

FlowForge is built around the open-source Node-RED project and is co-founded by its original creator Nick O'Leary and Zeger-Jan van de Weg, an early employee at GitLab.

Today, Node-RED is the most widely adopted IoT integration solution used by organizations including Siemens, Hitachi, and Bosch. More than 76,000 people list Node-RED as a skill on LinkedIn, making it one of the world's most popular programming skills on the platform.  

"Node-RED is an incredible tool that has allowed many organizations to quickly and easily prototype integrations, but it was missing crucial features that allow enterprises to move to production use,'' said Nick O'Leary, CTO of FlowForge. "FlowForge fills this gap by adding security, collaboration, and deployment capabilities that are essential for enterprises. FlowForge is Node-RED enterprise." 

The FlowForge platform provides engineers, systems integrators, and control engineers with the ability to quickly bring Node-RED into production, turning a process that often takes days or weeks, down to just minutes. Additionally, the product offers enterprise capabilities including multi-tenancy, role-based access control, and customer support from the world's leading Node-RED experts. Together, Node-RED and FlowForge empower users to build applications in the real physical world instead of just web applications. 

"Solving the challenges of interoperability and automation over heterogeneous equipment in manufacturing that blends the edge and cloud on a substrate is the magic of Node-RED, the open-source project started at IBM. With its immense adoption metrics of tens of thousands of weekly installs, the Node-RED open-source project has the trust of developers to enable innovative applications manufacturing/IoT cloud. Started by the founders of Node-RED and early team at GitLab, I believe FlowForge is the perfect team to bring the benefits of open source to the largest compute surface in the world," said Adit Singh, Partner, Cota Capital.

About Cota Capital

Cota Capital is a technology investment firm that partners with exceptional teams to build and grow timeless companies that enable the future. Cota delivers "knowledge capital," a differentiated combination of financial capital, deep operational expertise, know-how, impactful and data-driven market insights and intelligence, and a vast industry network. Together, these elements are put to work to empower Cota companies to execute their vision, unlock scale, minimize risk, and bring enduring ideas to life. For more information, please visit www.cotacapital.com.

About Open Core Ventures 

Founded by Sid Sijbrandij, Open Core Ventures (OCV) is a venture capital firm that starts commercial open-source software companies. Our team identifies open-source software projects with traction, recruits passionate project founders and contributors, and launches companies together. OCV companies aim to create tangible value for the open-source community by providing access to resources and reducing the barrier to entrepreneurship.

About FlowForge

FlowForge is an open-source PaaS for IoT. The platform is built around the open-source Node-RED project and is co-founded by its original creator Nick O'Leary and Zeger-Jan van de Weg, an early employee at GitLab. For more information, please visit www.FlowForge.com.

Source: FlowForge