Josef Brunner Named CEO of relayr

BERLIN, September 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --

• Internet of Things as-a-Platform provider relayr expands B2B business
• Internationally successful Internet entrepreneur Josef Brunner leads the upcoming US expansion of the multi-award winning young company
• Joining Josef Brunner at the helm of relayr is founder Harald Zapp as COO, giving this company two experienced and forward thinking Internet entrepreneurs to lead it to inevitable success

relayr has announced the appointment of founding investor, Josef Brunner (33), as their new CEO.  As one of the founders of AFT Ventures, an investment firm focusing on promising start-ups and headquartered in Munich, Frankfurt, and New York City, Brunner has actively supported relayr from the outset.

Now that he has completed his tenure with Cisco Systems, Brunner is excited to expand his involvement from seed investor to active leader at the global Internet of Things (IoT) as-a-service provider. relayr has spent nearly three years in business developing a culture of operational excellence. The management team led by Josef Brunner and founder Harald Zapp will build on this and focus on strengthening and building the business-to-business (B2B) offerings.

Brunner has career long history of founding start-up companies. He has been instrumental in launching multiple IT and Financial Security companies, which led to co-founding JouleX, an enterprise energy management start-up that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2013 for $107 million. Since the acquisition, the JouleX energy management platform has been marketed worldwide under the name Cisco Energy Management Suite.

relayr is one of the first companies to quickly and easily connect the physical world with the virtual world. With its end-to-end development solution consisting of the relayr IoT-Cloud, a software development kit, and a sensor kit, relayr addresses the biggest challenge of the Internet of Things: digitizing physical objects. Their initial success came with the multi-award winning "Wunderbar", an IoT Starter Kit for product developers that enables fast and simple development of applications for the Internet of Things (Rapid Prototyping).

Josef Brunner sees enormous growth potential for relayr, especially in the cloud offering for business. "Companies have to deal with the Digital Transformation and the great opportunities that come with it. relayr has everything businesses need to be successful in this newly developing market: experienced experts, a comprehensive vision for the development of the Internet of Things, agility, and passionate employees. Bringing my experience and extensive professional network as CEO is just the next logical step in keeping my commitment to ensuring the success of relayr." explains Brunner.

Founder and Managing Director at relayr, Harald Zapp, will continue to accompany and support Brunner in with operations and expanding the B2B business as Chief Operating Officer.  "With the relayr Cloud and the holistic solution portfolio for digital acceleration of the physical world, we have an exciting opportunity to play a decisive role in the next industrial revolution", Harald Zapp describes the opportunities of enhanced cooperation with Josef Brunner. "In the coming years, every business will have a huge need for networked devices, processes, and meaningful analysis of the resulting data, not only in Germany, but globally. With our partners Cisco, BearingPoint, A.T. Kearney and many other companies, we are well positioned to continue to play a leading role in the growing Internet of Things World".

About relayr 

Founded in April 2013 in Berlin, relayr delivers software, hardware and, consulting services to help companies meet the challenges of industrial digitization. The company has developed the Wunderbar, a hardware sensor kit that contains a collection of freely programmable sensors, metering and transmission modules for further use in virtually all technical equipment. To enable developers the ability to simply and quickly program these sensors, relayr offers an open source Software Development Kit (SDK).  Because the SDK is open source, it encourages and enables continuous improvement and integration with hardware and services from companies like SAP, Salesforce.com, or Cisco Systems.

relayr is winner of Cisco IoT Challenge in October 2014 of Focus Digital Star Award in January 2015 the CeBIT CODE_n Awards in March 2015 and the FINAKI IT Innovation Awards in June 2015.

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SOURCE relayr