IoT Development Company in San Francisco

Cost is a function of the build itself: a scoped IoT proof of concept at Bay Area rates, a production IoT product (custom hardware, FCC certification path, OTA, mobile and web dashboards), or full enterprise platforms with multi-tenant fleets, edge AI, and FedRAMP or HIPAA. Scope drivers include reference-board firmware, a minimal cloud backend on AWS IoT Core, and a 10-to-25 unit field trial. San Francisco rates sit above Austin and Seattle because of the Samsara, Verkada, and Particle talent premium. We give fixed-fee proposals rather than open T and M estimates.

California SB 327, effective January 1 2020, was the first US IoT security law. It requires any connected device sold in California to ship with a reasonable security feature appropriate to the device and the information it collects, transmits, or holds. In practice that means no shared default passwords, unique credentials per device or forced first-boot reset, no hardcoded backdoor accounts, and a documented disclosure path for vulnerabilities. Our discovery phase runs a SB 327 gap assessment, and production firmware ships with per-device provisioning, signed OTA, and a CVE disclosure policy. Because California is the largest US consumer market, SB 327 effectively becomes a national floor, and Oregon, Washington, and New York have followed with similar bills.

Yes. We ship cellular telematics gateways, video and access-control IoT, and high-density sensor networks patterned after the production architectures Samsara, Verkada, and Cisco Meraki have made public. For enterprise clients we run dual-cellular failover, NTP-synced time-series telemetry, signed OTA with A/B partitions, MQTT over TLS 1.3 to AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub, and per-tenant data isolation aligned with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. Mobile and web operator dashboards include role-based access, audit trails, and CCPA-aligned data subject request flows. We have patterned deployments after public Samsara and Verkada engineering posts, including Memfault-style crash telemetry, fleet-wide A/B rollouts, and observability into device health, not just uplink status.

Any device with an intentional radiator (BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRa, cellular, UWB) shipped in the US needs FCC Part 15 or Part 22 grant, and in Canada needs ISED RSS certification. We plan the cert path in week one, choose pre-certified modules (Nordic, Espressif, Murata, Sierra Wireless, Quectel) when timeline matters, and work with Bay Area labs like Element Materials, NTS, and ACS for emissions, immunity, and SAR testing. For cellular we coordinate PTCRB and carrier certification with Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Bell, and we manage Twilio Super SIM, Soracom, or Hologram onboarding. Custom-radio paths add three to five months and USD $40,000 to $150,000 in lab fees; we surface that on day one rather than after firmware is locked.

Yes. Bay Area IoT increasingly pushes inference to the edge for latency, bandwidth, and privacy. We deploy TensorFlow Lite Micro, ONNX Runtime, and ExecuTorch on ESP32-S3, Nordic nRF54, STM32U5, and Raspberry Pi CM4 targets, and we run heavier models on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Coral Edge TPU for vision and audio. Models are trained in the cloud (AWS SageMaker, Vertex AI) and pushed through OTA with version pinning and rollback. Common workloads include keyword spotting, anomaly detection on industrial sensors, person-and-vehicle detection on cameras patterned after Verkada, and predictive maintenance. We document model cards and bias considerations, because California biometric notice and CCPA obligations apply once a camera leaves the lab.

When client work touches Anduril, SpaceX Starlink, Lawrence Livermore (NNSA), or other federal sub-contracts, we default to AWS GovCloud (us-gov-west-1) or Azure Government for storage and inference, run firmware signing on FIPS 140-2 validated HSMs, and operate under FedRAMP Moderate baseline controls. ITAR-controlled designs are gated to US-person engineers, and we coordinate export classification through a client-side ITAR officer rather than handling it in-house. For dual-use commercial work we stay in AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 evidence. CMMC Level 2 readiness is scoped per engagement when DoD primes are downstream.

A typical Bay Area IoT product (custom PCB, BLE plus cellular, mobile app, cloud backend, FCC cert) takes nine to fourteen months from kickoff to first commercial shipment, assuming a competent ODM relationship in Shenzhen or Taiwan. Month 1 to 3 is reference-board firmware and cloud MVP. Month 4 to 6 is custom hardware bring-up, EVT and DVT builds, and FCC pre-scan. Month 7 to 9 is PVT, certification, and field beta with 50-to-200 units. Month 10 onward is MP ramp. If you are starting with off-the-shelf hardware (Particle, Blues Wireless, Notecard) timelines compress to four-to-six months. We have shipped to both cadences.

Most custom IoT engineering qualifies for the US federal R&D tax credit (IRC Section 41), which returns 6 to 14 percent of eligible US wage and contractor spend, and qualified small businesses can apply up to USD $500,000 against payroll tax under the Inflation Reduction Act expansion. Eligible activity includes firmware development, novel radio integration, hardware and cloud interface design, and systematic testing. California offers an additional state R&D credit at 15 percent of qualified in-state research expense. We deliver time-tracked engineering logs, technical narratives, experiment histories, and failed-hypothesis documentation aligned with the IRS Form 6765 and California FTB requirements. Final eligibility sits with your CPA and the IRS.