2019 Farewell

Those who have lived an entrepreneurial experience know how similar this is to ride in a roller-coaster. There are days where you are on the top of the mountain, ready to slide down at light speed, with the wind in your face yelling “I’m the king of the world”. But this marvellous moment finalizes quick and unexpectedly, and the next day you see yourself climbing up hill, slowly and hardly, sadly thinking “why I’m doing this?”.

But like in any roller-coaster, when you get off from it, you look back and say “oh man, that was good”.

So here I am, looking back to the last 12 months, which were full of ups and downs but with an amazing overall outcome. If I have to pick a headline, I will say Barbara IoT has found the product market fit during 2019. Our Secure Edge Platform for Industrial IoT is now being used in production for securely digitizing power generation plants, industrial logistics warehouses or smart agriculture deployments among others.

Our customers, including publicly traded large corporations and medium sized disruptive companies, are experiencing the time to market acceleration, CAPEX/OPEX reduction and security risks minimization, of using Barbara’s Industrial IoT solution in their digital transformation initiatives. Using Barbara, by securely acquiring/processing real-time data of their operations from the edge, some of these customers are increasing up to 30% the productivity on their operations, and this is something to be proud of.

Also, in this 2019, the industry has started to appraise Barbara IoT’s value proposition. Last July, the innovation platform INNOLAB Bilbao announced the incorporation of Barbara IoT to its acceleration program. INNOLAB is one of the most relevant and successful public-private collaboration initiatives in Spain and is being pivotal for the development of our solution in the Basque Country as well as north of Spain. The energy leader EDP also selected Barbara IoT as top-9 startups to accelerate among 500+ who applied for the program. We were invited to join the EDP start-up booths during the Web Summit in Lisbon, where we managed to have engagements with dozens of customers and investors, that I’m sure will end up in surprising announcements during 2020.

We know we couldn’t do this alone, IoT is an ecosystem game. This is why in March we organized our first Barbara Partners Day, and we were impressed with the response of the partners community. More than 50 attendees coming from system integrators, technology companies and channel partners, were interested in learning how to leverage Barbara’s technology in their Industrial IoT projects. As a result of that, we announced promising partnerships, such as the one with Alcatel Lucent integrating Barbara with ALU’s Rainbow platform, the one with Monolitic for the creation of the new secure Industry 4.0 development board, or the reseller agreement with Techdata, one of the biggest technology wholesaler worldwide.

We founded Barbara IoT back in 2016 to create the most secure and most easy to use Industrial IoT edge platform. We knew by then Industrial IoT was yet an immature market, and therefore a survival game. Now over three years later we realize, not only that we have survived (over 40% Startups fail in the first three years), but also that we have created an extremely solid foundation to ensure that when the Industrial IoT wave hits the market, Barbara is going to be perfectly positioned to surf this wave.

And behind all this success is the best team of talented people someone could ever dream. To all of them, and all of you, I wish the best luck for 2020. Happy New Year!

David Puron (CEO)

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