Resin.io scored both a new round of funding and a contract win from Soracom, which runs a funding program and provides a cloud-native, IoT-focused connectivity service platform.

Soracom was the lead investor in the $5 million funding round sourcing the money as the initial investment from its IoT Fund Program. That program is itself a component of Japanese telecom giant KDDI’s Open Innovation Fund III. KDDI acquired Soracom last year for a reported $181 million.

Past resin.io investors DFJ, GE Ventures, and Aspect Ventures also participated in the latest round. Resin.io has now raised $17 million in total funding.

Resin.io uses Linux-based containers and cloud technologies to support IoT deployments. Those efforts revolve around separating core operations of the IoT device from the application layer. This allows for a device to continue to communicate with its network host should an application fail.

The resinOS can manage multiple containers with one running a supervisor agent to make sure the device is running properly and can connect to the resin.io platform. The other containers run the user’s applications.

“Resin.io technology dramatically lowers the barrier for developers who are already familiar with cloud-side development to deploy software onto IoT devices,” explained Kenta Yasukawa, co-founder and CTO of Soracom.

Resin.io’s push into containers and IoT actually started with real containers. The company had a customer in London that was deploying smart garbage cans for the 2012 Summer Olympics. The initial tracking devices proved unreliable, requiring a technician to go out to every garbage bin to update the software.

Soracom and resin.io also will work to further integrate the former’s connectivity options with the latter’s software management platform. This will also include work on hardware to support seamless cellular connectivity for IoT devices.

Soracom’s IoT platform combines connectivity and cloud capabilities. Customers can manage their connections and devices using a web console and API to launch and scale capacity as needed. The company works with more than 10,000 customers.

Devices available directly from Soracom include SIM cards that can be inserted into network-ready devices, modules that can be inserted or embedded into an IoT device, and for European customers a device compatible with the Sigfox low-power wide area network.

For resin.io, the hardware work follows on past comments from its management about eventually making its own hardware. Alison Davis, director of product marketing and strategy at the company, previously stated those efforts were due to a lack of IoT hardware options that can take full advantage of the work resin.io is putting into its software.

The company has so far been defaulting to hardware built on the Raspberry Pi architecture, but Davis said it’s not really designed for production deployment for IoT.

“It works well, but things can be improved,” Davis said. “We are really just hoping what we can put together can help our customers scale more quickly.”

A recent MachNation IoT report forecast that IoT device management revenues will surge 58 percent this year, hitting $3.2 billion worldwide.