Hello Minim

Over the last 25 years, home WiFi networks have become nearly ubiquitous. Fueled by smart phones, connected devices and fast broadband, as prices for technology have plummeted, adoption has skyrocketed. For the past two years I have been obsessed with these phenomena and struck by the absence of any real solutions to bring order and security to the chaos that has become the connected home.

I researched the connected home space, trying to figure out the landscape of players and influencers, key developments and the voice of the consumer — to develop an informed point of view. I struck out on identifying a startup investment that fit my perspective on the market need and had nearly given up hope when I heard through the grapevine that an industry acquaintance, Jeremy Hitchcock, was working on the same theme with a new company he had started called Minim.

I reached out to Jeremy to see if he wanted to meet to compare notes, but to be honest, had little hope he’d respond. Jeremy was co-founder, CEO and on the board of Dyn, and I was the lead investor in NS1, a new startup that was competing directly against Dyn, so I had good reason to suspect he’d be less than interested in connecting. To my surprise, Jeremy agreed, and last August, we started talking. It was clear from the start that we shared a similar perspective, and I was blown away by Jeremy’s thoughtfulness and bias to action. I got to know the team and we began working closely together on Minim last fall. I couldn’t be more delighted to share in the company’s announcement of Minim’s Series Seed round, co-led by Flybridge and Founder Collective.

Minim’s vision is to simplify the complexities of the connected home to make faster home networks and happier customers. They have created a hardware and vendor agnostic platform that manages, monitors and secures home networks — with everyday consumers, not IT experts, in mind. They’ve built a system that will automatically identify and address configuration, performance and security issues — allowing consumer simple self-service as well full integration with ISP and hardware vendor support groups.

The team at Minim is stellar, and I am thrilled to have the chance to work closely with Jeremy, which is much better than competing against him. The team he has assembled is unreal — with the experts in networking, security, IoT, consumer and the service provider ecosystem — and I am really honored to be part of the company.

Minim is in early trials now, but adding more customers each day. They will be more announcements in the future about technology and product, but in the meantime, if you are excited by the challenges of taming the connected home and securing IoT devices, let me know — I’d love to hear what you are thinking!