IFTTT raises $30M from Norwest Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz to integrate with internet-connected hardware
With $30 Million More in Hand, IFTTT Looks to the Internet of Things — One ambitious start-up wants to reroute the plumbing of the consumer Internet.
Context & Ripple Effects
IFTTT has been building toward this since its $7M round led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lerer in December 2012, which funded the same ambition of connecting Internet silos — this $30M Series B brings Norwest Venture Partners in alongside a returning Andreessen Horowitz. In the interim the service proved the recipe model beyond web apps: an Android launch in April 2014 with deeper OS integrations than iOS, a Square integration in July 2014, and everyday automations like backing up Instagram photos to Dropbox.
The raise lands mid-wave of consumer IoT venture capital — SmartThings pulled in $12.5M from Greylock and Highland in November 2013 to power connected homes — and the story traveled unusually wide on pickup day, with Gigaom, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, SlashGear, The Daily Dot and bizjournals all carrying it.
First-order effects
- IFTTT gains the capital to move from app-to-app recipes into internet-connected hardware integrations, extending a channel it has already validated with Square and Android OS hooks.
- Norwest Venture Partners becomes a new backer while Andreessen Horowitz doubles down, keeping IFTTT's cap table anchored by the firm that led its 2012 round.
Second-order effects
- Connected-device makers like SmartThings now face a device-agnostic integration layer competing to be the glue between their products and consumers' apps — distribution through IFTTT recipes becomes something hardware vendors must court rather than own.
- App developers gain a new surface: any service IFTTT connects to hardware effectively gets IoT reach without building device support itself, raising the bar for platforms that charge for equivalent integration work.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, value in the consumer Internet of Things migrates up the stack from devices to the interoperability layer that routes data between them — the moat shifts to whoever holds the customer's automation context across brands.
- A neutral glue layer spanning walled-garden ecosystems sets up a structural tension with the big platform owners, who have both the incentive and the OS-level leverage to absorb or block exactly these cross-brand connections.
The trend: Consumer IoT venture money is consolidating around cross-device integration layers, as funders bet the lasting position sits in routing data between things rather than making them.