As in previous versions, the chart is organized into building blocks, horizontals and verticals. Pretty much every segment is seeing a lot of activity, but it is worth noting that those parts are not particularly well integrated just yet, meaning in particular that vertical applications are not necessarily built on top of horizontals. To the contrary, we’re very much very much in the era of the “full stack” IoT startup – because there is no dominant horizontal platform, and not enough mature, cheap and fully reliable components just yet, startups tend to build a lot themselves: hardware, software, data/analytics, etc. Some enterprise IoT companies, such as our portfolio company Helium, also have a professional services organization on top, as enterprise customers are at the stage where they try to make sense of the IoT opportunity and are looking for something that “just works”, as opposed to mixing and matching best of breed components. This is a typical characteristic of startups operating in an early market, and I would expect many of those companies to evolve over time, and possibly ditch the hardware component of their business entirely.
