Finland-based Wirepas, a company that specialises in developing scalable and reliable IoT networks, announced that it has secured $22M (€20.7M) in a fresh funding round.
Wirepas says the funding will support it in expanding its global presence and establishing itself as the IoT connectivity standard.
Global venture capital firm Highland Europe led the round with participation from new and existing investors such as Amalfi, IQT, ETF Partners, KPN Ventures, Vito Ventures, and Vesa Laisi. Inventure, Karma, and Tesi also backed the company.
“Today’s announcement and funding is a testament to our team’s dedication to the project, and we are grateful to Highland Europe for recognising this technology as a game-changer,” says Teppo Hemiä, CEO of Wirepas.
The story of Wirepas
Wirepas was initially established as a research project at the University of Tampere. In 2010, the university project was developed into the company we know today.
When Hemiä joined in 2014, the company started focusing on the network as a software product they could offer to new business areas.
In 2015, Aidon, a Nordic supplier of smart grid and smart metering company, recognised Wirepas’ potential and won a major smart metre contract in Oslo, Norway. This resulted in the world’s largest mesh network IoT deployment, with 920,000 smart metres connected to a single network.
After this success, Wirepas brought the benefits of its technology to the logistics and tracking market, as well as buildings and factories.
Wirepas has since expanded globally with offices in Australia, Germany, Finland, France, India, and the U.S., and 160 partners in many more. The company now provides smart tracking, smart building, smart manufacturing, and smart metering solutions to its partners. Over 7 million devices are now directly connected using Wirepas technology.
“Wirepas isn’t just an incremental improvement over existing technologies – this technology is setting a new standard for what’s possible,” says Laurence Garrett, Partner at Highland Europe.
“By offering a solution that is cost-effective and scalable, Wirepas addresses the two most significant barriers to IoT adoption,” Garrett adds.
Wirepas’ innovation
Massive IoT connects millions of devices in a single network for remote data monitoring and management by enterprises and industries. However, the limited solutions have often been outdated and inadequate in realising the full potential of applications like smart buildings, logistics, smart metres, and agriculture.
This is where Wirepas comes in. Wirepas’s self-configuring and decentralised mesh architecture uses algorithms to connect up to 16 million networks, each with an impressive 4 billion devices simultaneously.
“The dream of IoT – devices that communicate with each other to automate processes and collect usable data – has had huge appeal for a long time. But until now, there has been a disconnect between the limited, centralised IoT solutions of old and what is needed,” says Hemiä.
“Wirepas finally makes massive IoT’s promise a reality by bringing a radical and revolutionary approach to unlock its full potential,” Hemiä adds.
Unlike centralised systems, Wirepas’ decentralised system makes each device act as a relay for the next. This eliminates the need for a central base station, which reduces the amount of wireless spectrum required and extends the network’s range and resilience. It also significantly reduces the cost and energy needed to manage the network.
Its self-healing mesh architecture automatically reroutes data around failed sensors, keeping the network online without interruption. This is essential in applications where even a brief loss of connection can have serious consequences, such as meeting demanding >99.9 per cent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in smart metering.
The company has patented nearly 100 wireless technologies to address the scalability, reliability, and sustainability challenges preventing Massive IoT from reaching its full potential.
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