Ghent, Belgium – Sensolus, provider of IoT (Internet of Things)-based asset tracking solutions, has closed a financing round of EUR 3.5 Million. The Belgian firm enables companies to track non-powered assets in supply chains and industrial manufacturing, operating in various industries in more than 15 countries. The financing round is led by btov Partners’ Industrial Technologies Fund in addition to existing investors Annie Vereecken, Capricorn ICT Arkiv and Quest for Growth. The funding will further accelerate the company’s international growth and help realizing its product roadmap.
Logistics and supply chain processes depend on transport carriers such as pallets, boxes, containers, returnable transport packaging and trailers. Currently, most of those non-powered assets are not connected to the internet, resulting in lost and unused assets, stock shortages or under- and overcapacity. Sensolus solves these problems and provides a cost-effective end-to-end IoT solution to track these transport carriers in real-time and optimize the underlying process flows.
Connecting non-powered assets as a crucial step in the process
The solution consists of wireless trackers that are installed as simply as a sticker, last up to 7 years without charging, and communicate with the internet in real-time without requiring any other infrastructure. These wireless trackers collect crucial location, activity, and sensor data, which Sensolus combines with existing process data to generate supply chain metrics, to alert on anomalies, and to detect patterns that can lead to actionable insights for optimizing processes. Multiple industry leaders (e.g. Airbus, Volvo, AB InBev, SUEZ, T.C.R.) rely on Sensolus’ technology to get real-time visibility in their daily operations and save substantial costs.
The capital is raised to accelerate Sensolus’ growth in its existing market segment and to open up new segments in Europe and the U.S. Moreover, the company will expand its solution to connect more types of assets that are omnipresent in the global supply chain.
The digitization of processes in asset-intensive industries is the new normal
Kristoff Van Rattinghe, CEO and co-founder of Sensolus is happy about the investment: “It is great to welcome the international investor btov Partners with their Industrial Tech Fund,” he said. “We are entering a new era of the connected supply chain, we will be connecting millions of non-powered assets in the years to come.”
Today, more than 100,000 non-powered assets are connected to the Sensolus SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. Van Rattinghe is confident that this is just the beginning: “IoT technology has become mature and sufficiently affordable to directly connect all new types of non-powered assets such as boxes and pallets, of which billions of units are rotating invisibly in our world,” Van Rattinghe said. “On the other hand, digitization of processes is a must for our customers to remain cost-effective and competitive in their market. We have exciting years ahead of us.”
Edge-cloud intelligence as key enabler
The interplay between cloud as well as edge intelligence on the tracker makes the Sensolus solution unique. It allows capturing and analyzing the behavior of many different assets in a reliable, energy-efficient way and in a wide variety of verticals Sensolus is active in. This cloud/edge combination makes the complex and broad nature of low-power asset tracking available as a plug-and-play solution. Therefore, it scales to tracking large fleets of assets without losing control of the operational risk.
“Sensolus’ diverse team possesses significant domain expertise and great technological know-how in the fields of both hardware as well as software development,” said Benedikt Kronberger, partner at btov’s Industrial Technology Fund. “Sensolus’ offering, with its low overall total cost of ownership, long battery life as well as superior analytics capabilities convinced us to join the strong existing investor consortium. Moreover, through its patented technology, the company is ideally positioned to further consolidate its position as a market leader in the fast-growing industrial IoT market for asset tracking and process optimization applications.”
“From the start, we have been charmed by the capabilities of the Sensolus team to deliver scalable, reliable, and mission-critical end-to-end solutions to top tier industrial clients,” stated Marc Lambrechts, board member at Sensolus and investment manager at Capricorn Partners. “With this additional investment Sensolus will be able to expand further in the journey from collecting quality data to actionable insights.”
Source: Sensolus