Mocana Lands $11M Funding for IoT Security

Mocana Corporation, IoT security provider and winner of the Most Innovative Security Strategy Leading Lights Award at Light Reading's Big Communications Event 2017, announced $11 million in new venture funding from Sway Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Trident Capital Fund and GE Ventures. The new funding brings the investment total to $93.6 million.

Mocana's approach to IoT security is based on its Mocana IoT Security Platform, which provides trusted device status and software update capabilities for IoT devices through a gateway. This allows these features to be applied to IoT end points that may be too limited in capability to allow for software updates or advanced security within the device itself.

The Mocana platform allows both the device and its data to be trusted by securing the boot process and firmware. In addition, the platform secures data transmission among the device, gateway and cloud. Rather than solely providing a separate service to the end-using customer, Mocana has been awarded contracts to integrate its platform into the industrial IoT offerings of companies such as Dell, GE, General Dynamics, Panasonic, Schneider Electric, Siemens and Yokogawa.

Mocana is working with other companies to build an ecosystem of interoperable IoT devices and an open framework for IoT edge computing. The company is a founding member of EdgeX Foundry , alongside Dell, AMD, Canonical and 40 other companies.

Founded in 2002, Mocana now has hundreds of customers in the industrial IoT space and is expanding its presence into IoT fields such as avionics, through a partnership with DDC-I. In a written statement announcing the funding, William Diotte, CEO of Mocana, explained the dynamic that is leading the company to grow: "Hackers are taking advantage of weak security in IoT devices and industrial control systems, and the pace and impact of cyber attacks is only increasing."

— Curtis Franklin, Security Editor, Light Reading. Follow him on Twitter @kg4gwa.