Onomondo, the Danish startup of the day, isn’t unique in its product and doesn’t differentiate from other solutions by additional features, but it’s its main idea that makes it so elegant, so that’s what I’ll be talking about.
The startup, alongside a couple of competitors, have negotiated beneficial roaming terms with mobile providers globally and sell their sim cards to smart device manufacturers. As a result, the same motion sensor works in any country as soon as it is unboxed, the user doesn’t need to bother going to the local provider, and the engineers don’t need to spoil the device’s design for the sake of convenience of changing sim cards.
Overall, it would be nice to use cheap roaming not only for IoT, and it could earn way more money. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s easier to negotiate the minimum traffic of the detectors than a fully fledged internet connection. One can’t run a video through Onomondo’s solution. Pity.
The startup brought in USD 23M in its recent round. By the way, it took them 10 years before they reached their first sizable round – kudos for perseverance!
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
