Japanese IoT connectivity provider Soracom has added a million new connections in the last ten months and is now keeping more than 5 million IoT devices connected around the globe. According to the firm, its rapid growth is being driven by strong uptake of IoT devices in energy/oil & gas, payments/point-of-sale (POS), healthcare, consumer electronics, and agriculture.

A subsidiary of Japanese business telecoms provider KDDI, Soracom announced its first 1 million IoT connections in June 2019. In January 2022, the company announced that it had achieved 4 million IoT connections.

“Soracom’s powerful horizontal IoT platform makes IoT accessible to a growing number of partners, industries and applications,” said Kenta Yasukawa, cofounder and CTO, Soracom. “As a technology and business partner, we help customers in virtually every vertical offload heavy lifting to the cloud on terms that make sense for IoT. As we reach this milestone, we’re truly humbled by the ways Soracom customers and partners around the world are building new connected experiences.”

Soracom’s next-generation IoT connectivity platform is device-, cloud-, and bearer-agnostic. One customer is Pocketalk, a handheld, two-way translation device featuring a large touchscreen, noise-cancelling microphones, a text-to-translate camera, and the ability to help people connect across 82 different languages. Pocketalk uses Soracom to maintain connectivity for consumer, business, municipal and professional customers globally.

“With nearly 1 million connected devices sold worldwide, Pocketalk needs much more from a partner than just a connectivity contract,” said Joe Miller, General Manager at Pocketalk. “From our first device to our third generation, Soracom has supported our growth with everything from eSIM provisioning to local breakout capability to IoT architecture consultation. We look forward to working together for a long time to come.”