Actility Acquires Abeeway, Creating a World-Leading Portfolio of Location Technologies and Services to Support IoT Solutions

Actility, the industry leader in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) today announces that it has acquired Abeeway, the geolocation system specialist. By combining Abeeway’s patented location software and innovative products with the power of Actility’s ThingPark platform, the acquisition will give Actility a best in class portfolio of IoT location services to support service providers and IoT solution vendors across a wide range of industry sectors. The acquisition is Actility’s first following a $75m. fundraising round supported by new and existing investors, which is intended to enhance its technology portfolio and accelerate worldwide growth.

“We’re seeing massive demand for location-aware IoT solutions from industry,” says Actility CEO Mike Mulica. “We’ve been rapidly developing our ThingPark Location platform to deliver powerful tools to service providers and our customers in the tracking ecosystem. As a long-time partner with Abeeway, we saw great potential in adding their patented assisted GPS (A-GPS) technology and expertise in tracking to the capabilities of our ThingPark platform. This combination offers game-changing geolocation capabilities from an accuracy, speed, power consumption and TCO standpoint. We’re creating an IoT location platform that will enable a revolution in the logistics and supply chain sector. In fact, we think that geolocation and tracking are potentially the killer app for the whole of the Internet of Things.”

“Since the first LoRaWAN tracker was presented by Abeeway in 2015, Abeeway has continuously improved IoT tracking solutions, developing the first patented low power GPS (A-GPS for IOT) as well as data fusion to optimize localization & power consumption,” explains Abeeway Founder Florian Sforza. “Major players have already selected Abeeway products such as the Master Tracker and Micro Tracker. Becoming part of Actility’s rapid growth will allow us to leverage their market leading LPWA platform and global reach to satisfy the massive market demand for IoT location use cases. Abeeway products will also continue to be available for every LPWAN network.”

Abeeway is already a market leader in tracking devices offering on-demand geolocation, movement alerts or geofencing. These trackers use GPS signals to determine their location, but energy-efficient LoRaWAN communication to pass that location to a tracking application, so in comparison with trackers using cellular networks, they offer much longer battery life. The key innovation developed by Abeeway, providing a powerful competitive advantage to Actility location services, is an assisted GPS technology specifically optimized for LoRaWAN, which allows fewer satellites to be used for a fix and reduces the GPS lock time to a few seconds. The power required for both GPS signal acquisition and processing is reduced: this combination results in a dramatic increase in battery life, by an order of magnitude versus existing GPS location technology.

“The unique advantage of our platform is its ability to serve a huge variety of use cases by combining different location technologies including network-based TDoA location, GPS and A-GPS, Bluetooth beacons and wi-fi 'sniffing'," explains Actility founder and CTO Olivier Hersent. “Our customers can optimise their solutions to precisely match the requirements of their target use cases.”

ThingPark Location services will be accessible through APIs, which, coupled with the bidirectional capability of the LoRaWAN link, will allow developers to manage geolocation according to the needs of their application. For example, in an asset tracking and theft prevention scenario, the application may use low-power consumption network-based location to “geofence” a vehicle, raising an alert only when it strays outside a defined area. But if the vehicle breaks through that geofence, then the application can request regular GPS-based location updates to enable the vehicle to be traced in real time and recovered.

“We’re delighted to be bringing the Abeeway team and portfolio on board to pioneer this next evolution of IoT technology. Together we’re going to create a truly revolutionary global capability for the next generation of IoT solutions,” concludes Actility CEO Mike Mulica.

For more information please see: http://www.actility.com.

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Contact information

Actility:
Anne van Gemert: anne.vangemert@actility.com
or
Abeeway:
Stephane Sisse: stephane.sisse@abeeway.com