The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume which has built a mesh-Wi-Fi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and then uses it to deliver a range of smarter home services to some 22 million homes globally is announcing a major funding round of $270 million that underscores the opportunity to fix that, and more. "We’re the best at optimizing Wi-Fi connectivity in the home, but that is not what we’re about," said Fahri Diner, Plume's co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch.