Karma Ventures participates in the €10million investment to Wirepas
Wirepas, a Finnish company on a mission to change enterprise IoT, today announces an injection of funds aimed at accelerating the development of the world’s first purpose-built non-cellular 5G technology.
On the heels of announcing the product and new standard in May, Wirepas, currently servicing several world-leading clients, has seen an increased interest and demand from partners and customers to bring the product to market. Existing investors Karma Ventures and Tesi are rising to the occasion, providing a new injection of appr 10M euros.
“Thanks to the great market interest and lead customers’ fast time to market targets, we have decided to accelerate the first non-cellular 5G product development. We knew our solution was special and the need has become even more apparent and urgent over the past several months. This new injection of funds will help us continue to do what’s in our customers best interest, and that’s getting it done efficiently and as soon as possible. We target to have the commercial launch in 2022,” says Teppo Hemiä, CEO of Wirepas.
More specifically, the funds will be used to strengthen Wirepas’ longer-term research and to further develop the leading Massive IoT technology. Wirepas will also be hiring with a focus on development, testing and delivery, all aspects needed to successfully bring the solution to market.
“Karma focuses on deep tech and the impact it can have. Wirepas, with its solid team, technical strength, massive traction, and amazing steps in 5G, is in an ideal phase to benefit from more funding. We are convinced that Wirepas is changing the IoT landscape forever,” says Tommi Uhari, Partner at Karma.
The demand for affordable networks is high for businesses looking for scalable, high-density applications in a multitude of areas such as smart meters, building management systems, logistics and smart cities. More specifically, it will assist in the urbanization, building, and energy consumption in the construction of these smart cities. It also opens opportunities for new use cases, scaling at mass the levels of communication for the future.
“This is exactly what an investor hopes to see. We knew Wirepas had a great read on the needs of its clients and industries that have been struggling to find a solution that truly works for them. We’re excited to see the technology deployed and true impact realized,” says Juha Lehtola, Head of Direct VC Investments at Tesi.
This new 5G standard means that for the first time, any business, regardless of size, will finally be able to digitize their business with reliable and affordable 5G connectivity. It will allow industries to run their own independent IoT systems and develop new services around their own expertise and business domain. It also enables them to store and consume the data generated in the way they see best fitting for them (on premises, in public cloud or anything in between), democratizing the data ownership.
Wirepas’ current solution, Wirepas Massive, a large-scale mesh connectivity software for massive IoT, is already proving invaluable, scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient IoT solutions for over two hundred clients including Fujitsu, Prologis, Wurth, Schaeffler, Orange and Fagerhult.
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Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@zacong; Wirepas.