Particle today closed another round of funding to advance and expand its full stack IoT platform into more enterprise markets. The company raised $40 million in Series C funding led by Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners, which also included seven existing investors.

“We have the largest developer community in the [IoT] industry. Almost 200,000 folks build their products on Particle,” CEO Zach Supalla told SDxCentral. “Every prototype that is built with Particle has the potential of turning into 100,000 devices out in the field in a few years.”

The company plans to use the new funding to grow specialized teams and develop more of a focus in areas that are becoming increasing popular in the IoT space, including applications for micro mobility, energy, and the monitoring of industrial equipment, he added.

“In a lot of ways we’re in that early phase where people are launching their very first IoT products and they are picking the lowest hanging fruit” by connecting machines that have never been online, Supalla said. “That means there’s a lot of easy problems to solve” that then lead to greater interest in monitoring and training algorithms for predictive analytics.

Indeed, he sees significant growth opportunities in the overlap of artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT wherein sensor data from devices out in the field can be used to predict things that will occur in the future. It’s taken a long time for the layers of the technology stack to come together to deliver that, Supalla explained.

Big trends and advancements in ubiquitous computing, connectivity, and sensors are creating the building blocks for IoT, and Particle’s mission is to bring those assets together in a way that reduces costs and streamlines development cycles for enterprises that want to gain from IoT, he added.

More than 85 enterprises use Particle’s platform today, and its customers are gathering data from more than 22 billion sensors on an annual basis, according to the company, which also says it has experienced 150% year-over-year growth in revenue.

Particle is also striving to improve security, which Supalla described as an inherent problem for distributed IoT products that aren’t operating on the same networks. “That’s especially worsened by the fact that the companies delivering IoT products are not necessarily security experts, nor are many of the vendors providing sort of various layers of software along the way, and there’s a lot of room to screw things up in implementation,” he said.

The company tries to address this challenge by providing customers with a secure end-to-end offering that includes an edge computing stack that connects to its cloud service, Supalla explained. “Too often people rely on network-layer security,” he said. “It’s good to have those layers of security but at the same time no one should trust those layers of security because they’re huge attack vectors.”

Ultimately, according to Supalla, the responsibility for securing IoT devices falls on device makers. “If you are in manufacturing and delivering to market an IoT product, it’s your responsibility to make sure that’s secure,” he said.

Particle’s IoT platform is being used in agriculture, smart city infrastructure, fleet tracking and management, remote monitoring, and energy facilities. Last year when the company moved its desktop IoT developer tool to Microsoft Visual Studio Code it said about half of S&P 500 companies are using its platform for IoT.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2012 and has raised $90 million in funding to date.