IFTTT looks to the Internet of Things with $30 million in new funding

Automation startup IFTTT announced on Thursday that it has raised $30 million in a series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners. This brings IFTTT’s total financing to $39 million, as it looks to open up its developer platform. As part of the deal, the firm’s general partner Josh Goldman will join IFTTT’s board.”Short for If This Then That, the company connects various online services and hardware products with a simple recipe that follows its namesake. For example, if a small business owner processes a transaction over a certain amount on Square, then he can choose to receive that information on his Google Glass display.

One ambitious start-up wants to reroute the plumbing of the consumer Internet. Now it has the money to try to make it happen. The start-up, called IFTTT (pronounced like “gift” without the “g”), announced on Thursday it had raised $30 million in funding, its largest round yet, from the venture capital firms Norwest Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. If nothing else, IFTTT’s service is rather clever. The title is an acronym — short for “If This Then That” — which neatly describes the function of the product. It is essentially a giant switchboard to connect disparate services, anything from Facebook to text messages to telephone calls. Users can create “recipes” in which an action on one service can trigger an action on another entirely different service. Earlier this week, for example, I connected my Instagram and Dropbox accounts to IFTTT. I made a recipe that forced IFTTT to upload any new Instagram photo I took to my Dropbox online storage account. More than 100 other Internet services connect to IFTTT, including Twitter and YouTube.