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ZiFiSense Announces Completion of Series B+ Funding Round to Gear Up Its LPWAN 2.0
2018/12/04 13:42:14
ZiFiSense has announced the completion of a B+ round fundraising of multi-hundred-million yuan led by Lenovo Capital and VLight Capital with strategic backers from industrial groups such as Thailand Siam Cement Group (SCG) also participating. This round of financing will be used to develop a new generation of ZETA LPWAN 2.0 chip, further expand its technical ecosystem, as well as to build the world's first low power IoT network dedicated for tracking of goods in transit.
ZiFiSense has dedicated to the development of ZETA, a new generation ultra low cost, low power wireless communication technology for IoT in the last 6 years.
Its vision is to develop wireless IoT chips that only cost 10 cents USD, achieve 10 kilometer coverage, with 10mw power consumption (or even battery-less)through communication technology innovation and IP licensing, so as to quickly expand the ZETA ecosystem and market growth around the concept of "LPWAN 2.0 ubiquitous IOT" . ZiFiSense also facilitates a wide range of industries to quickly roll-out digital transformation solutions at a very low cost through provision of enterprise grade "chip-to-cloud" full-stack IoT infrastructure.
According to a report of McKinsey, by 2030 the global IoT market will value around $12.6 trillion. There have been a number of wireless technologies available in the market ranging from Bluetooth, NB-IoT, LoRa to LTE that fulfill the requirements of different use cases of IoT, primarily coverage, power consumption and costs.
Through its proprietary “advanced M-FSK” ultra-narrowband wireless modulation&coding technology, compare to competitors’ solutions, ZiFiSense can achieve 1/10 of the cost, 1/6th of the power consumption, 1/8 of the spectrum occupation, and can increase the maximum transmission rate by 6 times, so as to enable its vision of “LPWAN 2.0” that shall see LPWAN connectivity reaching a larger number of “things” beyond billions.
ZiFiSense has also developed a show case LPWAN 2.0 product, “ZETag P1”, which has the size of a stamp, powered by printed batteries and can be disposed of safely after use. The product has been seen tracking the whereabout of half-million high-value parcels per year for China Post.
Furthermore, ZiFiSense has been also building a network of thousands ZETA Access Points over telco tower that shall cover most motorways across China and a number of ASEAN countries with an aim to receive beacons directly from ZETags attached to goods or waybills being transported.
In terms of business model, ZiFiSense has followed a drastically different strategy against the industry norm (e.g. either selling silicon or complete IoT solutions). The company’s “T-shaped” go-to-market strategy see them doing a clearly defined mix of both.
Horizontally, through the provision of wireless communication IP, network equipment and IoT platform on Cloud, ZiFiSense cooperates with a number of international semiconductor manufacturers to jointly develop and promote ZETA technology and related chips and modules.
To boost ZETA technology development, the ZETA Alliance was jointly established with China Mobile Internet of things Corporation, Nokia, STMicroelectronics, NTT DoCoMo and other leading enterprises in the industry. The alliance has been set up to attract sensor manufacturers, platforms, integrators and application enterprises in the IoT industry, and cooperate closely with leading enterprises in different industries (manufacturing industries, agriculture, smart city, smart building, logistics and other industries). To date, ZETA alliance has more than 300 members and gradually expands its influence in the World.
In Japan, according to the recent survey carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 20% of enterprises responded to the survey cited ZETA as their preferred option in procuring IoT connectivity in the future. In Europe, ZETA standard has been launched in 2021. A European ZETA Alliance has been established and cooperation with a French IoT solution provider, Sensing Labs, has taken the form of the setting up of ZiFiSense Europa in order to distribute ZiFiSense products and solutions in Europe.
Vertically, the company focuses on a few use cases of industrial IoT such as goods tracking, reusable packaging and machine predictive maintenance, providing standard solutions combining software and hardware from the ZETA ecosystem. The main customers and partners include SAIC GM-Wuling, Bosch, JAC, Great Wall Motors, Nestle, SF Express, JD Logistics, Siam Cement Group, Baosteel Group amongst many others.
Specially, the company is about to launch a remote tracking service targeting goods in transit that comprise of a dedicated wireless IoT tag, motorway signal coverage and app that together costs less than 10 cents Euro per shipment.
ZiFiSense has been founded and is headed by CEO Dr. Zhuoqun LI, (who obtained a doctor’s degree from the Department of electronic engineering, Plymouth University and carried out postdoctoral research on low-power sensor networks at the Imperial College London, UK), with a fast growing R&D team that, comprises of veteran technical experts from leading communication technology suppliers and semiconductor companies. The company also enjoy a global presense in Shanghai, Cambridge (UK), Paris, Tokyo and Bangkok.
Shanghai Office, China
Room B, 20th Floor, No. 1098 Dongdaming Road (Pujiang International Financial Plaza), Hongkou District, Shanghai
+86 (0) 21-80198001+86 (0) 21-80198001
info@zifisense.com
ZiFiSense Europa
229 rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris
info@zifisense.com
Cambridge, UK
3 Charles Babbage Road, CambridgeCB3-0GT United Kingdom
+44(0) 1223 491 099
info@zifisense.com
Silicon Valley, USA
Plug and Play Tech Centre 440 N. Wolfe Rd. Sunnyvale, CA 94085
001 (408) 524-1400001 (408) 524-1400 (fax)
info@zifisense.com
Tokyo office, Japan
105-0014 東京都港区芝2-5-19 ITOビル5階
+81-03-6803-4317
info@techsor.co.jp
