Arduino recently received $22m in funding (see our previous post), and they went back for more: a gigantic $34m in series B VC funding announced today.
Congrats to Arduino and their team! This is now the biggest success story (by some definitions) of an open-source hardware company going “big.” With $54m in funding, the questions later will be who would acquire it for $500m+, will they go public, or what will be the eventual exit …
Arduino has a post, “What will we do with an additional $22M?” (PDF archive) and here’s where the funds are going:
A major chunk will be invested to further strengthen the R&D team based in Turin, Italy, with the goal to grow enterprise application libraries and the Arduino Cloud for Business with more integrations and embedded AI features.
They have a few more details about offices in the USA, however, none of the funding appears to be dedicated to open-source hardware, open-source software, or the open-source communinty, which I think it’s fair to say is what got Arduino where it is today and worth these levels of venture capital funding. Instead, “enterprise application libraries and the Arduino Cloud for Business” is where the focus is.
It’s good that Arduino clarified their current focus and where they are going with the $54 million, they recently removed references to “open source” on their pages, & Arduino “Pro” is not open-source, see our previous article “When Open Becomes Opaque: The Changing Face of Open-Source Hardware Companies.”
Actually, all the Arduino libraries for professional and enterprise users are completely open source so investing in enterprise libraries means developing tons of industrial-grade open source stuff.
The yearly open source report shows how open source development has been increasing over the last years:
https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/
https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/
(lots more in the upcoming 2023 report)
Does anyone really believe that open source is not relevant in the enterprise market? That would be quite narrow minded. 🙂
No thanks. Arduino lost its way.