Internet service providers for many years have been chasing visions of the connected home--a household packed with users, devices and applications of all different kinds, all feeding off ISPs’ bountiful broadband bandwidth and services.
The last year and a half or so should teach them to be careful what they wish for.
The good news is that the connected home vision is now reality. In many homes, everyone and almost everything is connected--parents, kids, laptops, tablets, smartphones, TVs, speakers systems, virtual assistants, doorbells. Adults and kids are working, schooling and entertaining themselves at home via their connected devices to a greater degree than anyone might have expected, potentially running many different applications and streaming services simultaneously, everything from Zoom to Disney+ to Fortnite.
The bad news is the vast and complex mix of services and apps being used in the connected home is more likely than ever to result in service disruptions whose true root cause can be extremely difficult to sort out.
Veego Software, a start-up with offices in Israel and the U.S., is looking to help ISPs make sense of connected home complexity by installing a software agent in home network routers that can monitor devices and their IP addresses within the household from the user experience point of view. From this it can create a “quality of experience” score that helps ISPs, application providers and the users themselves to better understand problems such as streaming breaks, poor audio, gaming latency and dropped video calls--potentially even before they occur--so they can be resolved quickly and without rolling out a repair truck.
“There are so many malfunctions and disturbances that can occur in the connected home, and you don’t know who to call, or who to blame,” said Veego CEO and co-founder Amir Kotler. “As a user in your home, you may suspect your ISP, but the problem could be coming from a device or the Wi-Fi router or the cloud or the outside connectivity, many places. We take customer service in the connected home from subjective to objective by providing a score for each experience.”
Veego this week announced it had closed a $13 million Series A financing round led by Magenta Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage Israeli startups in the AI, IoT, and enterprise software domains. The round also includes continued support from existing investors, State of Mind Ventures (SOMV), Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, North First Ventures (N1V), Amdocs Ventures, as well as additional investors.
Among those parties, Amdocs already is a well-known provider of billing and software systems to service providers, and will be one of Veego’s channel partners into the connected home market, Kotler said. Veego also aims to work with router manufacturers that could package its software with their hardware ISPs.
The new funding will help Veego broaden its market reach and enhance its machine-learning models that deliver real-time analytical capabilities across multiple use cases, Kotler said.
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