The connectivity of technologies and products through sensors, cloud saving capacities, and the analytics of large data sets enable the internet of things (IoT). Especially platform strategies are regarded as dominant concept to leverage the growing business possibilities of the IoT. However, despite their mentioning in the literature, platform business models have not been explicitly studied so far. To address this shortcoming, we use data from seven platform companies in the IoT field and derive patterns for value creation, delivery, and capturing. Furthermore, we shed light on the special role of partners and condense our results into a generic platform business model. We substantiate our empirical findings with theoretical insights from both but so far mainly isolated discussion on platforms and business models. Therefore, we develop an initial understanding how firms can develop platform business models along our proposed design parameters.