A cell phone for ‘things’
After raising $1 million in seed capital last year, a Stamford-based startup is raising another $6 million in venture capital as it develops a “cell phone for things” to track assets as they are physically moved from one location to another.
As of January, Precyse Technologies Inc. was $1 million along toward that goal, even as it markets a system it calls “iLocate” that would use a wireless network akin to that of mobile telephone carriers to track tags attached to or embedded in objects.
The system differs from existing tracking technologies that rely on radio-frequency identification (RFID) or global positioning system (GPS) technologies.
While providing early options for companies interested in tracking assets, RFID and GPS are limited in that they are ill-suited for two-way communication, a key component of the Precyse system. And companies can only draw RFID data when a tag passes close to an electronic reader programmed to pick up its signal, while Precyse promises far greater range, tracking objects up to a mile distant.
Stamford-based Gartner Inc. estimates that worldwide spending on RFID systems will top $3 billion this year.
It is a radical-enough idea that Precyse was a finalist last year in a contest to develop technologies to reduce traffic congestion, sponsored by Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp.; the Intelligent Transportation Society of America; and Spencer Trask, a New York City-based company involved in Precyse”™s venture-capital efforts. Precyse and several other finalists lost out to an Issaquah, Wash.-based company called “iCarpool.com,” which provides workers with ranges of choices for their commutes.
Precyse is thinking bigger than simply transportation networks ”“ by creating beacons with cell-phone-like communications capabilities, Precyse envisions its “Smart Agents” helping locate any manner of objects for manufacturers, fleet operators, defense agencies, health care companies and retailers.
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The company has applied for patent protection of a wireless communication standard it calls N3, which features low production costs, a range of more than one mile, and five years of battery life.
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In its formation phase, the company has been led by John Stopper, who at deadline could not be reached for comment. Before co-founding Precyse two years ago with Michael Braiman and Rom Eizenberg, Stopper was a senior vice president at Palo Alto, Calif.-based TIBCO Software, and before that at Aperture Technologies.
Braiman, the company”™s chief technology officer, previously led research at Septier Communication Ltd., an Israel-based company that developed GPS technology for the telecommunications industry. Braiman and Eizenberg are based in Israel.
Precyse has been working with enterprise resource planning software giant SAP AG to hone its system”™s application in large plants.
“If you are Pratt & Whitney, and you are basically refurbishing a jet engine and you have staff working on that, you would ”¦ give that person a unique, identifiable tag to carry with them at all times,” said Denis Browne, a senior vice president with SAP Labs, in demonstrating the technology at an SAP conference last year. “You as a technician working on this jet engine today have to go and sit in front of an SAP system and say, ”˜OK, where is such and such a tool, whose hogging it now, whose hiding it from me so I can”™t get access to it and its holding me up from doing my job?”™ So you are really cutting down on a huge amount of overhead associated with keeping the system of record, which is your SAP implementation, up to date and accurate and staying within compliance.”