Olivier Hersent, CEO, CTO and Co-Founder of Actility and I had a conversation this last week and as usual I found him building an organization from the ground up in rapid time.
Actility is implementing based on the LoRa technology, and what is amazing is how his venture funding shows the carriers’ support for his implementation strategy. Actility is being funded $25 million by Ginko Ventures, KPN, Orange (News - Alert), Swisscom and Foxconn. Now for those of us that remember Olivier from the Netcentrex days, it’s not surprising that he has gathered a great team and won the confidence of industry leaders.
Here is what the press release says as to why the funding has occurred.
The investment will allow Actility to accelerate its go-to-market strategy for ThingPark, its open standard IoT network solution; funding its operational resources, building a high level of service and continuing to develop technology partnerships to foster a healthy ecosystem. It follows a recently concluded technology partnership between Actility and Swisscom.
A fully integrated platform for nationwide IoT, Actility’s ThingPark is designed to enable IoT services for any market sector, offering ready-to-go IoT connectivity plus a full set of ready-to-sell applications in less than one month. It is a Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) radio network built on the LoRaWAN standard, developed and supported by the LoRa Alliance. LoRaWAN networks address the three critical elements required for IoT networks connecting billions of devices: low power, long range, and low cost. ThingPark represents the first end-to-end, LoRaWAN interoperable platform to serve the IoT market for every use case.
“Today’s wireless technologies are not optimized for IoT applications which require sensors to be low power and able to run on a battery with very little maintenance. ThingPark provides the technology to connect both long range and low power sensors over unlicensed ISM band spectrum, allowing low cost and fast roll-out of IoT networks for a wide range of IoT applications,” said Olivier Hersent, Founder, CEO and CTO, Actility. “We are delighted to have secured the backing of such prominent communications industry leaders.”
ThingPark Cloud is a cloud-based platform with a simple RESTful API for Apps that is deployed at base stations and pico cells to support a secured end-to-end fully bi-directional long range low power network. ThingPark is a network solution designed not just for the consumer wearable device market but for large scale enterprise and industrial use cases such as city light management, waste disposal or fleet logistics.