Collaboration software pioneer and former Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie has raised $11 million for his latest startup, Blues Wireless, an IoT company that aims to make it easy to connect almost any product to AT&T’s cellular network for a fixed up-front price, without usage charges.
Reached by phone, Ozzie confirmed that the startup has raised money from undisclosed investors, as revealed in an SEC filing March 26.
Blues is the newest project from Ozzie, who invented the Lotus Notes group messaging platform in the 1980s. Ozzie has since launched and sold two startups to Microsoft: Groove Networks in 2005, and Talko in 2015. He joined Microsoft after the Groove deal, ultimately succeeding Bill Gates as the company’s chief software architect, and helping to lead the launch of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
The idea for Blues came from Ozzie’s work as a board director at Safecast, a data monitoring nonprofit that launched in response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. A few years ago, he tried helping the organization build solar-powered cellular environmental measurement devices, but it was harder than expected.
Ozzie, an adviser to AT&T, reached out to the wireless giant for help. That’s when he began putting together concepts for a cellular IoT device that could be embedded into almost any hardware and seamlessly connect to the internet without relying on WiFi.
Blues came out of stealth mode in February 2019, announcing its Notecard “System-on-Module” device that runs on AT&T’s wireless network. The idea is to make it easy to connect almost anything — from a refrigerator to a propane tank to HVAC systems — to the internet, enabling remote management and monitoring. Part of the novelty is the business model. Blues only charges customers for the module itself, and nothing more after that.
“It’s a fixed price offer,” Ozzie said. “That changes the logic for a lot of people in terms of the decision to embed connectivity into a product that might not otherwise have it. They don’t have to manage cellular subscriptions, or much of anything. The assets can just be in the cloud.”
There’s also an ease-of-installation factor, particularly for customers that don’t have professional software developers who know how to implement and maintain existing IoT platforms.
“It’s probably been at least eight years of people talking about this,” he said. “The problem is that a lot of the solutions that have been attempted are extremely complex for the types of developers who build these little devices.”
Blues is targeting high-volume and low-cost use cases, Ozzie said. The company has been testing its technology with early customers for the past eight months, and the COVID-19 crisis has further highlighted the need for this type of connectivity. “We have had engagements with people making things and trying to track things that we didn’t have any exposure to even few weeks ago,” Ozzie said.
Blues is a distributed company with about a dozen employees. Ozzie spends a majority of his time in Boston, but still makes frequent trips to Seattle.