A coffee machine goes quiet in a motorway service station. The beans may be fine, the milk cold and the payment reader awake, but the machine has stopped reporting to headquarters. Somewhere, a tiny radio is staring at a mobile network it can no longer use. This is the uncelebrated corner of the Internet of Things where Eseye has built its business: the moment a connected product becomes an expensive, silent box.
Founded in Guildford in 2007 by engineers Ian Marsden and Paul Marshall, Eseye is part connectivity provider, part device laboratory and part control room. It supplies global eSIM service, industrial routers, embedded connectivity software, a cloud management platform and the engineering work required to make them cooperate. The company says its customers can reach more than 800 cellular networks in over 190 countries, supported by direct interconnects with more than 25 mobile network operators.
Marsden and Marshall arrived with useful scars. Before Eseye, they had worked on Zigbee, the low-power communication standard found in millions of connected products. Their next problem was cellular: how to make small, unattended machines behave reliably across networks that were designed primarily around people and phones. The company they formed has stayed unusually engineering-heavy for a connectivity seller. Its stated working rules are equally blunt - speak honestly, fear nothing, commit and stay committed. That last promise matters when the product may remain outdoors longer than the team that installed it.
The scale matters, but the more interesting idea is architectural. Conventional IoT buying can look like a relay race: a product team designs a device, hands it to a modem vendor, adds a SIM contract and eventually points the data at a cloud. Each component can pass its own test while the assembled product still fails in a basement, on a border or after a carrier changes its rules. Eseye calls its answer “device-first.” In ordinary language: test the whole chain before shipping thousands of units.
The SIM is an escape hatch
Eseye's AnyNet+ product is a multi-IMSI eUICC SIM. IMSI is the identity that tells a mobile network who the subscriber is; eUICC is the technology that allows operator profiles to be managed remotely. Put them together and the device is not permanently married to the first network printed on its paperwork. It can use roaming, load a local profile where regulations or economics demand it, and move to another available network when policy permits.
That sounds like a smarter SIM card. It is really a supply-chain decision. A manufacturer can build one product configuration instead of stocking a local SIM for every market. A device already bolted to a wall can receive a new profile over the air. A network sunset need not automatically condemn the fleet, provided the modem and radio technologies were chosen with enough foresight.
Reliability is limited by the weakest layer. Eseye engineers and manages across all five.
The Infinity IoT Platform is the control surface above that chain. Customers use it to provision SIMs, set spending and connectivity rules, inspect sessions, diagnose devices and connect through APIs to other systems. AnyNet SMARTconnect moves some of the judgment into the device itself. The software monitors the data path and can alter the radio access technology, network or route when conditions deteriorate. Eseye says this can remove up to nine months of connectivity development work for customers that would otherwise build similar logic themselves.
“With each EV charge station expected to have a lifespan of 5-10 years, it is imperative that our suppliers understand our need to have reliable and future proof solutions.”Remi Caron, Shell Recharge
Coffee is a connectivity business now
Costa Express makes the proposition tangible. Its 13,500 self-service machines operate across 17 international markets. Each connected machine brings together readings from more than 90 sensors: water flow, ingredient levels, operating health, time synchronisation and other signals. Eseye's Hera router and AnyNet+ connectivity send the information to Costa's systems, where an empty milk supply can become an alert instead of a disappointed customer.
What failed first in Costa's planning was not coffee technology. It was the assumption that connectivity at somebody else's premises would be dependable. Ethernet tied the machine to a shop or forecourt operator. A failed modem could mean lost sales and a site visit. Cellular gave Costa more control; multi-network cellular reduced dependence on whichever carrier happened to be weakest at that location. Remote diagnostics then turned maintenance from a mystery tour into a prioritised task.
The same pattern becomes less amusing in healthcare. Telli Health's remote patient monitors initially used embedded SIMs tied to AT&T. One network could not deliver the coverage and uptime the company wanted, particularly when patients could be rural and the devices needed to work with little setup. Moving to Eseye added multi-network reach and help through Verizon's device certification process.
Eseye's case study reports a 94 percent reduction in support costs, 80 percent faster patient onboarding and a 73 percent improvement in unique daily data transmissions. These are customer case-study figures, not the result of a controlled trial, but they expose the economics clearly. The price of connectivity is not only the monthly data plan. It includes calls to support, replacement devices, certification delays, truck rolls, churn and the clinical cost of a missing reading.
A market between the operators
Eseye occupies an awkward and useful position. Global operators sell their own IoT connectivity. Specialists such as Wireless Logic, KORE, 1NCE, Soracom, floLIVE and EMnify aggregate networks or manage eSIM estates. Hardware consultancies can design the device. Cloud providers receive its data. Eseye attempts to span those categories, including the joins where responsibility is usually blurry.
Its business model follows the same shape. Enterprise contracts can include SIMs and data, Infinity platform access, routers, design and certification work, deployment support and round-the-clock technical help. Mobile operators can buy Integra, a white-label orchestration offer. Prices are negotiated around countries, volume, usage and service scope; there is no public menu that makes a neat comparison possible. A free SIM trial and device assessment is the front door, not the whole bill.
Outside capital helped fund that reach. Public databases record several rounds, including £15 million from TELUS in late 2020, a reported $23.6 million financing in 2021 and $12.75 million of growth financing in 2024. The supplied company data puts annual revenue at roughly $31 million and headcount near 150; both should be read as estimates. This is not hyperscale consumer telecom. It is a specialist betting that large fleets will pay more for fewer nasty surprises over a long operating life.
Partners widen the map. AWS integrations send device data into IoT Core through a private route. TELUS is both investor and commercial partner. NLT Telecom added infrastructure and local network choice in Brazil in 2024. Sateliot and, later, OQ Technology extend the fallback idea beyond terrestrial towers to low-Earth-orbit satellite networks using 3GPP Release 17 standards. The pitch is that a device should choose among radio paths without its application having to care which skyward or ground-based route won.
SGP.32 adds freedom - and chores
In April 2026, Eseye added SGP.32 to AnyNet+ and Infinity. The new GSMA remote-provisioning standard was built for constrained IoT devices and gives enterprises more control over operator profiles. Eseye supports it alongside the older SGP.02 and consumer-oriented SGP.22 models, plus multi-IMSI fallback. Its commercial argument is shrewd: a standard can reduce lock-in without eliminating operations.
Someone still has to negotiate with carriers, configure access points, secure the provisioning infrastructure, watch data sovereignty rules, reconcile bills and decide when a profile should change. Eseye wants to be that someone. It also cautions that SGP.32 requires compatible SIM hardware and is not a magic over-the-air upgrade for old deployments. Migration often belongs in a device refresh cycle.
The part worth copying
Begin the connectivity specification before freezing the hardware. Test antenna performance, power budgets, modem firmware, network registration, cloud protocols and recovery logic as a system. Define what the device should do after one failed connection, after an hour offline and after its preferred network disappears. Price the site visit, not just the megabyte.
The model earns its keep when fleets are large, international, hard to reach or costly to interrupt: chargers, medical monitors, meters, vehicles, vending machines and equipment expected to sit in the field for a decade. It is less persuasive for a short-lived device in one country, with reliable Wi-Fi or a single adequate carrier and no serious consequence when the connection drops. Multiple networks cannot repair a poor antenna, extend a dead battery or invent coverage where no terrestrial or satellite signal exists.
That last limitation may be the cleanest explanation of Eseye's appeal. The company does not treat “connected” as a sticker placed on finished hardware. It treats connectivity as behaviour that must be engineered, observed and changed over the life of the product. The work is fiddly, commercial and deeply unphotogenic. It is also the difference between a coffee machine that reports an empty hopper and one that simply waits for an engineer.
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Explore Eseye's products, engineering material, customer cases and public channels.