French firm Actility, a specialist in low-power wireless networks for the Internet of Things (IoT), secured a $25 million funding round which included three European operators and Foxconn.

The round was led by Ginko Ventures and numbered operators KPN, which says it has acquired a minority stake in Actility; Orange, which invested €3 million; and Swisscom, with which Actility recently concluded a technology partnership.

The list also includes BPI, Electranova and Truffle Capital.

Actility will use the funds to accelerate its go-to-market strategy for ThingPark, its open standard IoT network solution; funding its operational resources, building service levels and continuing to develop technology partnerships, it said.

ThingPark is an integrated platform for nationwide IoT, “designed to enable IoT services for any market sector, offering ready-to-go IoT connectivity plus a full set of ready-to-sell applications in less than one month,” the statement added.

The product is a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) radio network built on the LoRaWAN standard, developed and supported by the LoRa Alliance, a group of players which support a global standard for long range low power (LoRa) connectivity and enabling IoT, machine-to-machine, smart city and industrial applications.

KPN is a founding member of the alliance and plans to introduce LoRa in the Netherlands before the end of the year.

ThingPark represents the first LoRaWAN interoperable platform to serve the IoT market for every use case, the company claims, and includes ThingPark Wireless, ThingPark Cloud and ThingPark Store.

Orange has said it is a strategic investor and is investing through its Digital Ventures programme. It will be represented on Actility’s board of directors as well as its strategic advisory committee.

Pierre Louette, Orange’s deputy CEO, who is also responsible for Orange Digital Ventures, said that Actility’s connected objects platform corresponds to the ambition of Orange Digital Ventures, adding that IoT is an “extremely promising new market”.

Meanwhile, French startup Sigfox announced the integration of its IoT network protocol in the new Samsung ARTIKTM platform as well as Samsung Ventures’ investment in the company.

“The integration is designed to extend the cost-effective and energy-efficient benefits of the network to the Samsung ARTIK developers designing IoT products and services around the world,” Sigfox said in a statement, although terms of the investment were not disclosed.

“With the introduction of the Samsung ARTIK platform, we set out to accelerate innovation in hardware, software and services for the IoT, to allow the technology to more quickly tackle global challenges,” said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics.

Earlier this month it was reported that the Spanish units of Telefonica and Samsung were developing two prototypes for IoT to integrate the vendor’s mobile devices with the operator’s Thinking Things platform.