> What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.

Maybe professional users like Raspberry Pi did (with the known consequences)? Getting out of that hobby/tinkerer niche with lots of counterfeits from China is probably something to strive for.

The problem with Arduino is that, whatever microcontroller they're using can be easily sourced by anyone else. That's why it's so easy to clone them.

For Raspberry Pi, those mobile phone SoC are rather difficult to source. You need to have contact with the SoC vendor to get a hand on them.

Sure, but "real" industry users want support for the hardware and software. They will pay for support contracts and customization if it saves them in house labor time.

They want inroads into professional control systems / IoT / etc market. Certainly the hobbyist market can't give enough returns, but it's a hugely important funnel into the pro world.

Maybe the IoT market. Lots of demand for low-power hardware these days.

The Arduino is very expensive on the context of mass-produced circuits.

But yeah, maybe they'll use the money to get some cheaper wholesale products. Or maybe they'll expand their hardware to fully support low-scale IoT.

I'm not sure there is enough potential for low-scale IoT for that investment to pay off. But doing something cheaper can indeed work, and requires some money.

Too bad they aren't explaining what they'll do. The buzzword density of the article doesn't add any confidence that the company managers know what they are doing, but it could be a smoke screen.