Robert Bosch GmBH announced in December 2017 its first investment in distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the corporate venture capital arm of the Bosch Group, purchased IOTA tokens – currently the tenth most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap. The company is seeking to intensify its collaboration with the IOTA Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation from Germany.

“Bosch is one of the pioneers actively driving the adoption of distributed ledger technology in the automotive and Internet of Things (IoT) industry. The investment in IOTA’s token, the first ever token investment of RBVC, will help us working closely with the IOTA Foundation to explore the industrialization of this exciting technology,” said Dr. Ingo Ramesohl, Managing Director at RBVC.

According to the official release, Dr. Hongquan Jiang, Partner at RBVC, will join the IOTA Foundation’s advisory board. The investment follows the successful launch of IOTA’s data marketplace, with more than 30 leading companies worldwide participating.

“We have been working with the IOTA team for more than one year. I'm very excited about IOTA's innovative tangle technology, which could potentially become the standard underlying technology for trustless machine to machine communication, security and payment in the IoT space,” said Dr. Hongquan Jiang. “There will be much synergy between Bosch and the IOTA Foundation, and I'm looking forward to seeing more industrial adoptions of this technology in the near future.”

IOTA enables machines to securely transact data and money with each other. It is the inventor of Tangle, which it describes as a “blockless distributed ledger which is scalable, lightweight and for the first time ever makes it possible to transfer value without any fees.” Recently, Taipei City partnered with the IOTA Foundation to drive its efforts towards reaching smart city goals.

“Bosch and IOTA have been in contact since 2015 and are working together on multiple fronts, including the Trusted IoT Alliance (TIOTA) and other projects,” said David Sønstebø, Co-Founder of IOTA. “The decision by RBVC to acquire a significant amount of iota tokens solidifies the idea of the Machine Economy and how significant leaders in this space share our vision.”