Onomondo, the Danish company that runs its own mobile network for connected devices, has agreed a deal worth more than €100M that hands a majority stake to Aspirity Partners, a UK investment firm focused on enterprise technology and connectivity. The announcement on 30 September confirms that EIFO, the Danish state investment fund and a shareholder since 2021, is increasing its position alongside the new owner.
This is a change of control rather than a growth round. The money combines new capital with the purchase of existing shares, Verdane, which led a growth investment in 2022, is leaving the register, and the transaction is expected to complete in early 2027. No valuation has been published and no leadership changes were announced, with Rasmus Jensen staying as chief executive and co-founder Henrik Aagaard as chief technology officer.
Onomondo was founded in 2018 and now serves more than 500 customers in over 100 countries, with access to roughly 700 mobile networks. Maersk, Carlsberg and Husqvarna are among the names on its list.
Owning The Core Network Is The Whole Argument
Most IoT connectivity providers are virtual operators, buying wholesale access from a mobile network and reselling it with a management portal attached. Onomondo built the layer underneath instead, running its own packet gateways and routing and integrating directly with operators rather than renting their core.
That decision is what the company sells. Traffic from a customer's devices passes through infrastructure Onomondo controls, which is where the visibility, the routing choices and the diagnostics come from, and it avoids the situation where a connectivity problem in one country can only be escalated to somebody else's support desk.
"The core network is built for business," Aagaard said, describing the approach as bringing everything under one unified layer. The revenue mix follows the same logic: most of it comes from infrastructure services rather than from selling megabytes, which is an unusual position in a market where data tariffs are the usual unit of sale.
What It Looks Like In Practice
Maersk is the clearest example. The shipping company runs a private LTE network across 450 vessels using Onomondo, which according to its senior vice president Sonny Wilkels Dahl moved the operation from monitoring at fixed points to near real-time data during ocean crossings.
That is a harder problem than it sounds. A container ship crosses jurisdictions, loses terrestrial coverage for days and carries thousands of sensors that need to behave identically whatever network they find, which is the kind of requirement that pushes a company towards industrial connectivity built as infrastructure rather than bought as a tariff.
The Same Control Point Keeps Appearing
Onomondo has also built its own eSIM IoT Manager for the SGP.32 standard, and says it did so specifically to avoid depending on another vendor for the component that issues profile instructions. It partnered with the eSIM company Kigen in July.
That decision looks more pointed alongside the rest of this week. Aeris added an SGP.32 orchestrator to its platform on 1 October, and Kigen announced the first security certification for an automotive eSIM running the newest version of the standard. Three companies, three announcements, all circling the same question of who runs the provisioning layer once the specification itself stops being a differentiator.
For buyers the pattern is useful. SGP.32 was meant to end operator lock-in, and the companies selling it are each making sure the replacement dependency sits with them.
Private Equity Changes The Question
A controlling investment from a private investment firm sets different expectations from a venture round. Aspirity describes a pan-European strategy in enterprise technology and connectivity, and this is its first investment in the Nordics, which in a market as fragmented as European IoT connectivity usually points towards building a larger group by acquisition.
Co-founder Ralph Choufani talked about orchestrating a continuous fabric of connectivity, and his colleague Joseph O'Mara framed Onomondo as the first step in that regional strategy. Neither statement commits to anything, but the direction is familiar.
Existing customers have no immediate reason for concern, since the management team is unchanged and the deal does not close until early 2027. The questions worth asking are the ones that follow any ownership change: whether contract terms hold at renewal, whether the roadmap survives the new owner's priorities, and what happens to pricing once the firm starts looking for returns.
Physical AI Is The Pitch, Not Yet The Business
Both sides reached for physical AI in explaining the deal, with Choufani arguing that managing billions of distributed devices needs intelligence at the network level and control from cloud to edge. Aagaard was more measured, treating it as a future opportunity rather than present demand.
The second framing is the accurate one. What Onomondo sells today connects ships, brewing equipment and garden machinery, and those customers want reliability, coverage and a bill they can understand. Machines that act on what they sense will need all of that and more, which is a reason to build infrastructure now rather than a description of current revenue.
A Vote For Infrastructure Over Resale
The deal is a reasonable signal about where value sits in IoT connectivity. An investor taking control of a company at this size is buying recurring infrastructure revenue and a network asset, not a reseller's margin on somebody else's data.
Whether that thesis holds depends on execution that will not be visible for a while. The deal closes in 2027, the integration and expansion follow after, and the companies relying on Onomondo today will judge it on whether the connectivity keeps working exactly as it does now while all of that happens around them.
