The “Diamond” Among IoT Platforms
How a bootstrapped two-person company from Vreden, Germany grew by several hundred percent, convinced the founders of Sinch, and raised 1.2 million euros to become a leading global IoT platform.
300%
Growth in 2020
400%+
Growth in 2021
€1.2M
Total funding
40,000+
Users today
Bootstrapped from day one
Datacake was founded in 2016 by Simon Kemper and Lukas Klein in Vreden, Germany. For years, the two built the company organically and on a solid foundation - no outside capital, no shortcuts. The product: a cloud-based low-code IoT platform that lets small startups and large industrial companies alike manage IoT networks and monitor them with individually configurable dashboards.
In conventional German industry, sales meant getting in the car and visiting companies in person. It worked - but it never quite fit the product, or the founders' DNA.
The pandemic pivot
When the Corona pandemic hit, those sales channels disappeared overnight. Instead of standing still, the team made a radical decision: Datacake would exist purely as a SaaS cloud solution. The platform was opened up to third-party hardware, and by jumping on the fast-growing LoRaWAN market, Datacake won its first self-service customers from all over the world.
Suddenly, the feedback came from places where digitization was already a given - Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, the US. The hurdle to get started was so low that growth took on a life of its own.
From 58 users to a global platform
The numbers tell the story: 58 users in May 2020 became 11,230 just two years later - today there are more than 40,000 across 50+ countries. Datacake grew by 300 percent in 2020 and by more than 400 percent in 2021, scaling its infrastructure and server architecture along the way.
Through it all, the team stayed fully remote - no office, distributed across the globe. What sometimes met with incomprehension in Germany turned out to be the company's biggest source of flexibility and resilience.
“I have tested a lot of IoT platforms over the years. For me, it was like finding a diamond among all the vendors. We were very impressed by the speed of development, the quality of innovation and the quality of the platform.”
Backed by the founders of Sinch
In 2022, on the company's fifth anniversary, Datacake closed a seed investment of 650,000 euros - followed by an additional 550,000 euros, bringing total funding to 1.2 million euros. The investors: Cantaloupe AB, founded by Björn Zethraeus and Kristian Männik - the founders behind the communications giant Sinch - and Predli AB, founded by Marcus Zethraeus.
Like Datacake, the investors started out self-financed before growing into listed players. Their goal is a strategic, long-term partnership: qualified specialists, new technical functions, multilingual customer support - and a shared vision of making Datacake the world's leading IoT platform.
“We have a lot of confidence in the Datacake team. I am convinced of the corporate culture that Simon Kemper and Lukas Klein have established. Our vision is to build a profitable and valuable company together with Datacake - the world's leading platform in the IoT market.”
The next chapter is being written right now
Meet the people behind the platform, or start building your own IoT project on Datacake today.