UK IoT company FloLive has received an extra $15.5m in a series B round led by Intel to enable the rollout of its global 5G network.

The company provides secure, cloud-native global connectivity management for the IoT. The $15.5m brings its series B financing round to $37m.

The investment was led by new investor Intel Capital, with participation from existing investors Qualcomm Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 83North, Saban Ventures and Arie Capital.

The allocation of unlicensed cellular bands for public use was initiated in the USA with the introduction of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and is becoming a global trend as additional countries such as Germany and the UK follow. These initiatives, alongside the growing need of enterprises for secure, high performance connectivity, have resulted in a fast-growing demand for private 5G networks.

This provides a viable alternative to VPN and wifi connectivity that is more secure and cost-effective than traditional legacy connectivity approaches.

Private 5G networks are suitable for enterprises as they offer secure and performance-oriented connectivity that is flexible in meeting corporate IT, quality and security policies. As manufacturing, logistics and healthcare centres are becoming connected and smarter, the virtues of private 5G networks pose a tight fit for them, ensuring longevity and business continuity.

“We see significant traction in the market for 5G networks, with private 5G networks being the indisputable leader for both private campuses and national deployments,” said Nir Shalom, FloLive’s CEO. “While healthcare and Industry 4.0 may be considered the natural customers, one of the emerging sectors is utilities, which is more prone to cyber attacks, data leakage and foreign espionage; we intend to put more focus on this segment and gain significant market share.”

5G cellular networks comprise two major building blocks – the radio access network (RAN) and the core network. FloLive’s 5G core network can be deployed using private RAN when in closed campuses and connect to the public RANs deployed by national carriers for national deployments required by national utility companies.

FloLive’s private 5G network, one of the company’s IoT connectivity offerings for enterprises and mobile operators, is built atop its common software-defined connectivity infrastructure – a cloud-native framework that provides the flexibility, performance and security required by the IoT ecosystem.

Its cloud-native offerings place the company at an important juncture, raising interest by global cloud providers and large industry leaders as recent industry studies indicate that mobile operators, a traditionally conservative industry, are changing their mindset and beginning to adopt cloud-based options due to their fast time to market, elasticity, low total cost of ownership and cyber-security protection.

“We are truly excited about FloLive’s unique cloud-native approach to IoT connectivity,” said David Johnson, managing director at Intel Capital. “Cloud-native architectures bring efficiency, scalability and flexibility which are important for IoT services. In addition, FloLive’s cloud-based core can provide consistency of features across many independent private and public networks. We look forward to the expansion of FloLive’s products and services enabled by this investment.”

FloLive’s products are witnessing strong traction from their target markets; the company intends to invest the new funds in three main alleys – strengthening its technology stack, upgrading its global network to 5G and building a global SIM2Cloud offering by partnering with a global cloud provider.

“We are honoured to be recognised by a prestigious investor like Intel Capital as an innovator in 5G platforms,” said Shalom. “Having Intel Capital’s investment gives us confidence in the road we’re paving towards our global success. Equally important is the continued trust and tremendous support of our existing investors. Together, these are invaluable to our growth.”