FlowForge lands $7.25M in funding to smooth IT-OT integration

FlowForge, a company founded last year to leverage the low-code Node-Red programming tool to help ease the transition to enterprise IoT environments, has raised $7.25 million in seed round funding.

The funding announcement came just days after the U.K. company released its FlowForge 1.0 platform, which eases creation, deployment and management of Node-Red workflow environments. 

Node-Red itself enables developers to create applications by pulling different nodes together in a programming environment and outlining how they should be wired together, a capability which could be of major significance to companies looking to deploy enterprise-wide IoT and advance the integration between their IT and OT environments.

Node-Red has been around for many years, originally developed by IBM before becoming an open source tool, moving under the management of the JS Foundation, part of the Linus Foundation, about six years ago. It has been popular, but its value also may have been limited by scalability and ease-of-use challenges, according to some comments in online forums. 

FlowForge aims to conquer those issues by enabling ease-of-use and ease-of-management capabilities such as one-click deployment of devices and a consolidated management view of all of an enterprise’s Node-Red instances. 

There are other companies trying to address some of the same issues, but FlowForge’s secret weapon is that its founder and CTO, Nick O’Leary, was the co-creator of Node-Red at IBM and served for almost four years as the company’s Node-Red project lead and open source developer advocate.

FlowForge’s seed funding round was led by Cota Capital, joined by Westwave Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Open Core Ventures.