French startup Sigfox S.A. today announced it has raised $158 million to expand its Internet of Things network into 60 countries.

Salesforce.com Inc., French utility Total S.A. and entrepreneur Henri Seydoux are among the more than a half-dozen new backers that contributed to the round. They were joined by a similar number of repeat investors from the blue chip group that led Sigfox’s previous $115 million raise last February. Overall, the firm has taken in more than $300 million to date.

Sigfox, based in a small suburb of Toulouse nicknamed “IoT Valley” for its high number of tech firms, is using its war chest to build a global network of cellular towers that use so-called Low Power Wide Area wireless technology to send and receive data over free radio bands. The startup can’t transmit information as fast as carriers that operate in the commercial frequency spectrum, but its service is cheaper and requires less power to access, which is ideal for most connected devices. A soil sensor, as an example, only requires Internet connectivity every few days when it’s time to broadcast new moisture readings.

Sigfox’s wireless plans start at $1 per device per month for organizations with more than 50,000 endpoints. Its network currently serves about 10 million connected objects in 26 countries. Using today’s funding, the startup will expand into 34 more territories through 2018 and develop new features to make its value proposition more appealing. One of the first items on the agenda is adding integration with the Salesforce.com’s IoT Cloud, a managed toolkit for processing machine-generated data from the edge of the network.

Sigfox is trying to establish an early lead in the LPWA market before the competition becomes too entrenched. It’s facing off against fellow startups such as San Diego’s Ingen Inc., a consortium of networking companies called the LoRa Alliance and several other players that are developing their own networking standards independently.

The list includes AT&T Inc., which recently teamed up with Amazon.com Inc. as part of an effort to address the rapid increase in connected devices. Sigfox will have to move fast if it wants to stay ahead of the pack.

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