A couple of years ago, Andy Cronk had an idea for a database business. No longer were computers the only devices sharing data. Fitness trackers, cars, appliances and even buildings were producing digitized info that needed to be stored somewhere for analysis. Mr. Cronk would start a company to service this new “Internet of Things.”

He applied to a San Antonio tech-business bootcamp called TechStars Cloud in 2012 and, in exchange for signing away 6 percent of his company, he got a $100,000 loan, $18,000 in seed money and into the program. All this despite a startling lack of progress: Mr. Cronk's company, TempoDB, had neither customers nor a functioning product. In fact, he and his two co-founders, Justin DeLay and Mike Yagley, had not written a single line of code.

But the cloud-computing geeks at TechStars liked his idea and his experience. Mr. Cronk, 30, had logged two years as a software engineer at Motorola Inc. in the 2000s, followed by a stint as founder and CEO of Cameesa, a before-its-time crowdfunding company and product-development chief of Indie Energy, a geothermal-heating systems provider in Evanston.

Today the Internet of Things has evolved to a budding phenomenon: Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. predicts that by 2020, the Internet of Things will consist of 26 billion devices generating $300 billion of revenue for companies like TempoDB. Mr. Cronk has signed on about 20 enterprise customers, including the Australian government, which uses his River North-based startup to track solar power usage.

CASH FLOW

Last October, TempoDB raised $3.2 million from investors led by Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners, bringing the company's funding total to $4.2 million. Mr. Cronk won't disclose financial results.

TempoDB charges customers $1 per 1 million stored data points. To put that in perspective, a smart utility meter taking readings from three devices every minute would generate 1.6 million data points a year.

After TempoDB completed TechStars, prospective investors pushed Mr. Cronk to relocate to Silicon Valley, because even though Chicago's tech scene was growing, highly technical big-data companies were still uncommon here. Mr. Cronk chose to stay, attracting talent with this pitch: “When you say, 'We're doing something that's very technical, and some people don't understand,' that attracts the right kind of developers for us — people who want to work on hard-core computer science problems, not ads or deals,” he explains.

TempoDB has 10 employees and Mr. Cronk wants to staff up to 18.

Mr. Cronk grew up near Flint, Mich., and graduated from Kettering University, a local school that specializes in funneling young engineers to Big Three automakers. Mr. Cronk moved to Chicago to develop automotive software for Motorola and then to launch Cameesa.

Jason Seats, managing director of TechStars Cloud, credits TempoDB's progress to the company's timely product — and Mr. Cronk's salesmanship. “He's done the work and he's very good at it now, which is indicative of the traction they're getting.”