Particle Comes Full Circle, Becomes Part of Digi — Whose XBee Inspired the Company's Founding

Internet of Things (IoT) specialist Particle has announced that it has been acquired by Digi International — the very company that inspired chief executive officer and founder Zach Supalla to create Particle in the first place.

"Imagine you’re a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 27-year-old entrepreneur who wants to build a smart lightbulb in 2012. Where do you start? There was exactly one option available: the XBee from Digi," Particle's Zach Supalla recalls. "While the XBee got me off the ground, it was designed for local communications over a Zigbee network. I wanted to connect my product to Wi-Fi and control it remotely via a cloud service and developer API [Application Programming Interface]. I swapped out the XBee for a Wi-Fi chip and quickly discovered that nobody had greased the skids for Wi-Fi and cloud-connected devices the way Digi had for Zigbee. After the lightbulb project crashed and burned, we pivoted to build exactly that product: the Spark Core, heavily inspired by Digi's XBee."

That experimentation with building a smart lightbulb — which, Supalla admits, resulted in a learning process not entire free of electric shocks — gave birth to Spark, which would then become Particle. In the years since the Spark Core was crowdfunded, Supalla's company has grown to over $20 million in annualized recurring revenue and has launched a range of products — most recently the Tachyon, a Qualcomm-powered all-in-one single-board computer with 5G cellular connectivity and edge compute capabilities.

That growth hasn't gone unnoticed: Digi has seen what Particle has done based on inspiration from its original XBee, and has decided the two companies can do more together than apart — announcing the acquisition of Particle.

"This acquisition positions us to lead the shift toward intelligent, connected product platforms and accelerates annual recurring revenue growth for Digi," says Digi International's president and chief executive officer Ron Konezny of the deal. "By combining Particle and Digi, we now deliver embedded-as-a-service for customers at scale. Together we remove the complexity businesses encounter when embedding connectivity and intelligence for actionable operational insights to drive better business outcomes and efficiencies from edge to cloud."

As for those already in the Particle ecosystem? Business as usual, Supalla promises. "Nothing is changing about what we do today," he tells current users. "We'll support all customers and products the same way we always have — just with more resources, broader reach, and a longer view. Our cloud services will continue to evolve and expand, and we'll keep bringing new devices to market while supporting our existing portfolio."