Ray Ozzie’s cellular IoT startup Blues Wireless raises $22M

Blues Wireless, the IoT startup founded by former Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie, has raised $22 million from investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Blues is the latest venture from Ozzie, who invented the Lotus Notes group messaging platform in the 1980s. He later launched and sold two startups to Microsoft: Groove Networks in 2005, and Talko in 2015.

The goal is to make it easy to get almost anything online — from a refrigerator to a propane tank to HVAC systems — to enable remote management and monitoring.