Our journey into collaborative hardware development…
Did not start until very recently and to be frank, started off in the complete opposite direction.
In fact, in our past environment as product development consultants, privacy mattered much more to us than transparency, and sometimes even more than the success of our clients.
As consultants, our supply chain was our secret sauce… our go-to-guys for linux kernel development or custom antenna design or overmolding of FLEX PCBs (for example) were our guys, not anyone elses. If you needed help with anything IoT, we were the ones that could do it for you… your “one-stop-shop”.
This worked for us for awhile, but it was not sustainable long term and it didn’t feel right to charge for services that we were outsourcing. We soon decided to divest the services business to one of our clients that we had managed to service reliably from our internal engineering capabilities.
Determined to change our narrative, we created the Ioterra brand as a marketplace and became strong proponents of specialization. We encouraged service providers to specialize and narrow services offered, rely on partnerships in order to better service clients. We began showcasing reference IoT projects and applications, and tagging the products, components and services involved.
Despite these efforts, we still got it wrong. The only people adding example projects were companies interested in selling their services and solutions and as such, the featured projects came across as advertisements and did not effectively connect with all related parties. On top of this, we charged service providers to create listings and showcase products, effectively inserting ourselves as middlemen all over again.
This brings us to the next chapter of Ioterra. We are ready to fully remove ourselves from the middle… FINALLY. All fees will be removed and the marketplace anyone will be able to publish projects, products, and services. The Ioterra directories will grow for collaborative startups and projects to share their product supply chains, help fellow hardware companies, and find existing hardware builds to work from. We will encourage our community to highlight products, showcase work, and talk about components that they are using or thinking of using. We will encourage product owners and service providers to be transparent about the building blocks and partners that are part of their projects. We will fund the growth and maintenance of these open-source directories via public/private features, sponsorships, events, and white-glove supply chain consulting.
As in the world of software development, we hope to see more companies proudly stating that they are “powered by” their supply chain partners, rather than indirectly suggesting they are magical divinations born from raw innovation. Hardware innovation is impossible without collaboration. We are inspired by the collaboration we see within communities such as iFixit and StackOverflow and we want to be part of the movement to make open-source, transparent hardware development the mainstream.
With this in mind, we have many features planned to facilitate and incentivize hardware developers to help hardware developers. Please reach out for more information!
And as always, please feel free to connect via email if you would like to schedule a time to meet.
Saludos,
Danny
Our Values
Ioterra is committed to helping make hardware development more connected, collaboration friendly, and supportive. These values keep us motivated to pursue our mission and help us have fun everyday.
Send It
We think big. Set ambitious goals, follow through on commitments made, give tasks their all, and pick ourselves up to try again when we miss.
Work Smart
We get high on efficiency, and appreciate the work-life balance. When we run into a challenge we throw our intellect at it, and we aren’t content to put bandaids on things and move on. We get to root causes and solve them.
One Team
We rely on each other, we win together, and we lose together. We see the glass half full. We don’t struggle alone. We band together to solve any problem.
Don't be a Robot
We surround ourselves with those who are excited and passionate about their work. We value humor, energy, and authenticity in all interactions. We maintain an informal and fun work environment.
We believe in starting development from existing supply chains.
Often, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Discover what has been done before and collaborate to get to market faster and more reliably.
400+
80+
Service categories
200+
Off-the-shelf and 80% solutions to work from
NEW
Supplier partnership opportunities!
Want to help hardware developers find solutions? Help us grow this database!
Ioterra began as a private, pay-to-use database of suppliers.
It is now a free, community-driven public database.
How we got here
2015
Early beginnings
We got started in product development as an engineering firm focused on IoT. Over the course of 5 years we grew & launched several dozen IoT products and learned to appreciate the importance and difficulty of technical architecture decisions.
2019
Ioterra born
The founders and the core team had a revelation about IoT. At the time there weren’t any websites that consolidated research on hardware and software solutions, by application, in one place (especially when it came to industry-specific solutions). We founded Ioterra to fill that need.
2020
Service division acquired
In 2020 the services part of the company was acquired by an OEM customer, and the division has continued to grow.
2020
Research & reviews directories launched
Our directories provided a field guide for product development. We initially added our network of trusted and reliable partners to the directories, but quickly had lots of demand to join. So the directories grew organically from there.
2021
A growing ecosystem
Since the launch we’ve been proud to help over 2,000 product developers make challenging software, hardware, and hiring decisions by getting trusted information to them. We also launched an IoT community and started a Product Development conference.
2022
Today
We continue our mission of bringing more insights and better quality help to our customers, and we are development more ways to help companies confidently choose software and hardware for their products development initiatives.
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