The Bosch brand may be most recognizable from the company’s high-end home appliances, or perhaps from its numerous power tool brands, including Dremel and Vermont American. In reality, Bosch’s core business has historically been in the automotive parts industry.
Today, however, the 131-year-old German industrial giant is a global supplier of technology and services, employing roughly 390,000 associates worldwide (as of December 31, 2016). The company generated sales of 73.1 billion euros in 2016.
Even with such success, Bosch is now undergoing an end-to-end digital transformation.
For Bosch, such transformation is all about innovation. Not content simply to rest on its numerous successful lines of business, Bosch continues to be at the forefront of global innovation.
At the tip of this innovation spear is Robert Bosch Venture Capital (RBVC), Bosch’s startup investment arm. While many large enterprises today have their own investment arms that focus on growth, for Bosch, the focus is on innovation.
Ingo Ramesohl, Managing Director at RBVC, makes this strategy clear. “Our main mission is strengthening Bosch’s innovation leadership,” Ramesohl explains. “We’re undertaking minority investments in relevant technology and business models around the world.”
Broad Investments in Innovation
Given Bosch’s industrial background, what technology would be relevant? “The Internet of Things [IoT] is a focus area,” Ramesohl says. “We’re also investing in artificial intelligence [AI], machine learning, deep learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and automotive.”
The inclusion of automotive with this list of hot buzzwords may seem incongruous, but the automotive industry’s ongoing disruptive innovations in IoT-based connected cars, as well as electric and self-driving vehicles, puts Bosch and its portfolio companies in the driver’s seat, as it were.
In spite of its broad focus, however, RBVC is quite selective. “We look at 2,000 startups per year,” Ramesohl says, “and we have 35 in our portfolio.”
Among this short list: Graphcore, a company producing a semiconductor specifically for AI; Actility, a wireless IoT platform provider; Sensoro, a platform for long-range, low-power IoT sensor networks in China; and Foghorn Systems, a vendor that provides edge computing and fog computing technologies for the industrial IoT.
RBVC’s Latest Investment: iguazio
RBVC’s most recent investment is iguazio, a data platform and analytics vendor who has rebuilt the data stack from the processor up to the application layer. iguazio announced its B round of investment this week, with participation from RBVC as well as Pitango, Verizon Ventures, CME Ventures, and its existing investors.
Data-centric technologies aren’t explicitly on RBVC’s list of hot investment areas, but of course, all these areas of innovation – in particular, the IoT – depend upon data. “The technology from iguazio is quite disruptive and interesting,” Ramesohl says. “iguazio improves access to data in a disruptive way.”
iguazio’s core innovation: it rewrote the entire data stack, including a fine-grained security and policy engine as well as data processing and caching technologies. Its low-level code takes advantage of the built-in capabilities of modern processors instead of relying heavily on processor caches, thus dramatically speeding up the entire stack.
The Central Role of the Cloud
Bosch realizes that the cloud is central to its digital strategy, and the company has sufficient economies of scale to build its own cloud, the Bosch IoT Cloud, rather than relying upon public cloud leaders like Amazon.com or Microsoft.
Ramesohl expects iguazio’s technology to be a central enabler of the Bosch IoT Cloud, providing faster access to data while requiring fewer servers to deal with large data sets as compared to traditional cloud infrastructure.
The cloud’s role in the IoT is one reason why iguazio’s innovation made the cut for RBVC. “From Bosch’s cloud activities, we see that fast and efficient handling of memory is the key to the future,” Ramesohl added. “We see a very promising future for iguazio.”
As the IoT matures, Bosch is well-positioned to compete with other industrial IoT players, in large part because of its innovative portfolio companies and the technology each one brings to the table, including innovative solutions for smart home, smart cities, connected mobility, and connected manufacturing.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, iguazio is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Bosch.