SUSE Acquires Losant for Industrial IoT Platform
Open-source software company SUSE has acquired Losant, an industrial IoT platform provider. The acquisition is intended to create a full-stack, open process automation platform for the "industrial tiny edge." The move aims to provide scaled operational awareness and automation for sectors like smart factories and logistics.
- SUSE has a history of strategic acquisitions to enter high-growth markets, including its 2020 purchase of Rancher Labs to become a leader in the Kubernetes container management market. - Losant, founded in Cincinnati in 2015, had raised a total of $25.2 million in funding over 7 rounds prior to the acquisition. - Losant's technology is a low-code application enablement platform, designed to simplify the complexity of building and scaling custom IoT applications for non-developers. - Prior to the acquisition, Losant's customer base included major enterprises such as Verizon, Bosch, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. - The founders of Losant, Charlie Key and Brandon Cannaday, previously founded, built, and sold another company called Modulus. - SUSE was founded in Germany in 1992 and was the first company to market and distribute Linux for enterprise use. - The acquisition follows SUSE's transition back to being a private company in August 2023, after its majority shareholder EQT Private Equity announced a public purchase offer to delist the company.
