Onomondo raises over €100M as Aspirity takes majority stake

Onomondo, the Copenhagen operator connecting enterprise IoT devices in more than 100 countries, has raised over €100 million from Aspirity Partners, which takes a majority stake, and Denmark’s sovereign investment fund EIFO, to scale the global network infrastructure behind its platform.

Europe keeps hearing that it cannot fund its own infrastructure companies – too capital-hungry, too slow, too boring for a venture fund’s clock. And yet on 30 September, one of the continent’s least flashy companies landed one of its largest cheques of the week. Below, I lay out the round, the network behind it, and why a majority-stake deal in Copenhagen says as much about European growth capital as it does about IoT.

A majority stake, not a Series letter

Aspirity Partners is taking a majority stake in Onomondo, with EIFO, Denmark’s sovereign investment fund and an existing shareholder, increasing its investment alongside; the combined commitment exceeds €100 million, announced on 30 September. The co-founders remain invested. Nobody printed a Series letter on this deal, and that is the telling part – it is growth equity with control changing hands, which is how infrastructure assets mature rather than how consumer apps exit.

The capital has three jobs, in the company’s words: expand Onomondo’s international presence, scale its infrastructure deployment, and keep developing its proprietary technology. “We took a fundamentally different path by building the foundational infrastructure layer that was missing,” said CEO Rasmus Jensen in the announcement.

The operator Maersk runs at sea

Onomondo is a full-stack cellular operator built for machines rather than people. It runs its own mobile core with access to roughly 700 networks worldwide, replaces the plastic SIM with a software SoftSIM, and pipes device data straight into cloud platforms through what it calls Cloud Connectors. More than 500 customers in over 100 countries run on it, including Maersk and Carlsberg – and the Maersk deployment, a private LTE network spanning more than 450 vessels, is what the company describes as the world’s largest private LTE network at sea.

“The next challenge is creating the right data and getting it to the right place. That is an infrastructure problem, and it is the problem we have spent eight years solving,” said co-founder and CTO Henrik Aagaard in the announcement. Eight years is the honest timescale for this layer of the stack – there is no blitzscaling a core network.

4.7 billion connections, growing at 14.3%

The market Onomondo sells into is enormous and oddly unloved. Cellular IoT connections reached 4.7 billion in 2025, up 13.3% year on year, and are forecast to grow at a 14.3% CAGR to 9.2 billion connections by 2030, while mobile operators generated $20.8 billion in cellular IoT connectivity revenue in 2025 (IoT Analytics, April 2026). Read those two numbers together and the strategy writes itself: billions of connections but thin revenue per SIM, so the margin lives in the software layer above the connectivity – precisely where Onomondo builds.

For scale, our fundraising data this same week logged IPercept’s $16.5 million Series A for industrial machine monitoring and Reverion’s €154.2 million Series B for carbon-negative power plants. A €100 million-plus growth cheque sits at the very top of Europe’s weekly range – and this one went to connectivity plumbing, not to a model lab.

Copenhagen’s quiet infrastructure decade

So what does this deal signal? First, that European growth capital shows up when the asset is infrastructure with blue-chip customers on long contracts – the reality is that our late-stage gap is a gap in conviction more than in capital. Second, that state investors are behaving like owners: EIFO increasing its stake alongside a new majority investor is the Danish state doing what Bpifrance has long practised in France, compounding into its winners instead of only writing first cheques. The good news is that this playbook travels; imagine if every European sovereign fund re-upped into its infrastructure companies at the control-deal stage.

What we will be watching from here: whether Onomondo’s roughly 700-network footprint deepens outside Europe, where the expansion money is pointed; whether Maersk-style private networks become a product line of their own; and whether Europe’s fragmented IoT connectivity field – dozens of resellers, few true platforms – starts consolidating around the full-stack few.

Europe does not need to copy anyone’s late-stage playbook to fund the boring layers everything else runs on; it needs more balance sheets willing to hold them. Copenhagen just showed what that looks like. Watch where the next quiet €100 million lands.