The acquisition of Actility by Netmore, announced today, is part of a movement that the massive IoT market anticipated without ever really seeing it materialize. After more than a decade of rapid but disorderly technological diffusion, the LoRaWAN ecosystem is entering a phase of consolidation which responds less to a need for innovation than to a requirement for industrialization.
The observation is now shared by all stakeholders, LoRaWAN has established itself as a robust standard for smart metering, connected cities, buildings and certain critical industrial uses. Its promise is based on proven fundamentals: energy efficiency, low unit costs, and the ability to connect millions of objects. But this technical success was built on a fragmented landscape, where operators, platforms, integrators and private networks evolved in parallel, without a player capable of ensuring global orchestration.
Fragmentation that has become a structural brake
For a long time, this fragmentation encouraged experimentation, the emergence of local uses and adaptation to sectoral constraints. But as the projects changed scale, it became a hindrance. Difficulty guaranteeing consistent service levels, complexity of cross-border deployments, heterogeneity of security and maintenance models, high coordination costs. So many limits have weighed on the ability of LPWAN to establish itself as a critical infrastructure in its own right.
Actility has until now occupied a central but incomplete position in this landscape. Co-inventor of the LoRaWAN specification and founding member of the LoRa Alliance, the Parisian company has structured the software ecosystem with its ThingPark platform, today used by dozens of operators and thousands of projects in more than a hundred countries. It played a key role in the standardization, interoperability and industrial diffusion of LoRaWAN, without however directly controlling the operation of the networks.
Since its creation Actility has raised more than 100 million euros, notably from ID INVEST (Eurazeo)
Netmore brings precisely this dimension, the Swedish group has built itself as a massive IoT network operator, with a logic of aggregation of public and private infrastructures, and an industrial operation oriented approach. The acquisition of Actility marks the meeting between these two worlds, the platform and the operator, in a clear attempt at vertical integration.
Crossing the threshold of industrialization
With more than fourteen million IoT objects now under contract, Netmore has reached a very important threshold in LPWAN. Massive IoT relies on low unit revenue business models, which require very large scale to fund network resilience, security, software updates, and regulatory compliance. In this sense, size becomes a condition of viability rather than a competitive advantage.
The integration of Actility also makes it possible to meet requirements that have become stricter in recent years. Managing roaming between public and private networks, support for business protocols such as DLMS for smart metering, and even secure firmware update capabilities are becoming prerequisites in a more constrained regulatory context, particularly with the gradual entry into force of the Cyber Resilience Act. These building blocks, already present in Actility’s offering, take on another dimension when they are integrated into an operator capable of deploying and operating them on a large scale.
A consolidation closely observed by European operators
The support shown by historical players in the sector, starting with Orange, a long-time partner of Actility and a major user of ThingPark, illustrates the strategic reading of this operation. For large operators, consolidation appears to be a necessary step to secure their IoT offers, rationalize value chains and guarantee the sustainability of LoRaWAN infrastructures in the face of cellular alternatives such as NB-IoT or LTE-M.
This operation also sends a broader signal to the European ecosystem. In a market dominated by global cloud platforms and standards driven outside of Europe, the ability to structure an open, simple and operable infrastructure on a global scale constitutes an issue of industrial sovereignty as much as competitiveness.
To review our report: Faced with Sigfox, how Actility is doing well in the low-speed IoT market
