Decawave investors step in to back TCD spinout Danalto

Angel investors who realised huge gains from the $400 million (€336 million) sale of Irish chip maker Decawave last year, have backed Trinity College Dublin spinout Danalto in a new €1 million seed round.

Announcing the investment, Decawave co-founder Ciaran Connell, who now chairs the start-up, told The Irish Times he believes Danalto could become far bigger than the company he established with Michael McLaughlin in 2007.

Danalto is a distributed internet of things (IoT) software platform provider that is focused on providing highly-accurate low-power asset and personnel tracking intelligence for large open spaces – both indoors and outdoors – in a single platform.

While some technologies such as GPS are useful for asset and location tracking services outdoors, they generally don’t work well indoors. The opposite situation exists for other technologies such as Bluetooth and wifi.

Danalto has overcome this problem though with a platform that provides high-accuracy location services in open spaces with minimal power and infrastructure requirements.

The company specialises in deploying flexible IoT solutions and technologies based on the low power wide area network (LoRa) networking protocol, which allows long-range communications at a low bit rate among connected objects such as sensors in any environment.

It is now taking this even further by coupling LoRa with ultra-wideband technology to make tracking even more reliable and seamless.

There are a number of different use cases for this, with asset tracking among them. Mr Connell said he expected take-up would largely initially be by industry but that it would likely expand into the enterprise and consumer space.

‘Revolutionary’

He described the work that Danalto is doing as revolutionary and said it is leagues ahead of anyone else in what it is doing.

“Right now they are the only ones in the space and the only ones thinking of this space. Undoubtedly they will face competition in the future but they are several years in advance of everyone else,” he added.

Danalto was established by David McDonald, Tom Farrell and Albert Baker in 2017. The founders previously led Pervasive Nation, a Science Foundation Ireland-backed initiative to establish an IoT research infrastructure to facilitate academic research and the testing of pre-commercial ideas by Irish companies.

The latest investment takes total funding to date to €2 million with the company having previously raised €1 million from Atlantic Bridge and Enterprise Ireland.

Mr Connell said the company would use the new funding in part to increase headcount from 10 to 30 people by the end of the year. He added the company would be opening up a Series A round at the end of the second quarter with plans to raise between €5 million and €10 million.