I am about to engage some mild best guesses in the history of 1NCE. In 2017, a year before the merger of T-Mobile USA (Deutsche Telekom) and Sprint (News - Alert) (Softbank), Alexander Sator developed the concept 1NCE, the first flat rate IoT service. At the time, both T-Mobile (News - Alert) and Sprint had some success in IoT, but both companies were primarily focused on the consumer market and IoT was not yielding a huge amount of revenue, compared to voice. However, Alexander Sator was familiar with IoT and understood that, once IoT was enabled, it was going to have a (relatively) continuous consistent rate of usage and not fluctuate like the consumer market. He also recognized that the Deutsche Telekom’s (News - Alert) global network could easily support the volume of traffic IoT would generate.
Now comes the serious speculation. I think Alexander Sator, founder and co-EO of 1NCE, was well-respected in Germany for being a leader at Telit and Cinterion, as well as his serial entrepreneur background. As T-Mobile USA and Sprint started the talks on the consumer market, it was clear that Sator’s pitch for 1NCE focused on enterprise IoT made sense.
We are now back to the press release official timeline.
Now, let’s look at how the money will be used.
Since 2017, 1NCE has raised a total of $160 M and, while it still known for it’s lifetime flat rate pricing model, this investment is intended “to broaden its product portfolio with a next-generation Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) platform, add new AI tools, continue global expansion of operations, and further grow its presence in the United States.
The funding round supports 1NCE’s plan to continue its global expansion, which started in 2022 with a focus on the United States, APAC and LATAM. 1NCE now has team members working from 30 countries, with branches in 11 countries offering regional operations for sales, billing, distribution and warehousing. Coupled with a strong digital customer experience and support in 25 languages, 1NCE currently has a userbase from 50+ countries.
1NCE also plans to leverage the new funding to broaden its product portfolio for use cases across dozens of industry verticals. The company is preparing the launch of its next generation platform to further cement 1NCE as one of the preeminent destinations for IoT. For customers already using the 1NCE OS software for their AI projects, the company plans to launch new features soon. The company believes that AI growth will fuel adoption of IoT, with customers eager to ramp up data collection that strengthens their AI-driven engines.
The company also intends to use a portion of the funding round proceeds to further grow its presence in the United States. Expanding the U.S. market means increasing the workforce.
“The U.S. is our largest and fastest growing market, and we‘re expanding our American workforce to accelerate our momentum. 1NCE already delivers at an incredibly high quality with consistency and industry-defining endpoint availability of 99.97%. This funding further increases our ability to expand our competitive advantage across the world,” said Ivo Rook, Co-CEO of 1NCE.
"1NCE is a true global player in IoT with a variety of financial backers from the worlds of finance and telecom. Closing a strong round affirms that we are on the right track for continued success with our next generation SaaS platform,” added Sator.
In the past, I have had interesting conversations with the worker bees of 1NCE and I have always been impressed with their philosophy of keeping things simple for the enterprise customer, particularly on the issues of SIM management. If the company finds the path to do the same with its SaaS solution and vertical market modules, I am sure its popularity will grow.