A satellite image of a Fish Farm (Courtesy of R3-IoT)
Two former Clyde Space engineers are seeking initial investment for their new Glasgow-based startup, R3-IoT, which aims to provide satellite IoT and backhaul services to industries operating in the most remote regions of the world. R3-I0T Co-Founders Allan Cannon and Kevin Quillien said their target markets would include land and sea agriculture, environmental monitoring, remote healthcare, and renewable energy.
"There is a huge market for this kind of service. Interest is growing in predominantly large enterprises across a range of sectors looking to make efficiencies or improve productivity through better access to data," said Cannon. "We've had a lot of interest in our funding round as we look to take the business to the next stage."
Through their new venture, Cannon and Quillien hope to make it easier for remote businesses to connect their assets to data. As the global enterprise market transitions to "Industry 4.0," for which nearly all assets are connected, collecting and transmitting data in order to keep up with the pace of innovation, connecting data pipes to remote assets can be difficult and expensive. "[Our customers] may even currently send someone in a plane or boat to collect the data, which is time-consuming, expensive, and the data itself is lagged by the time it's delivered to decision-makers," said Cannon.
For many of these remote operations, satellite IoT is the most viable solution, requiring less infrastructure investment compared to other options.
R3-IoT opens their first investment round after recently winning a 100,000 British-pound prize at the Scottish Edge awards. The new company also solidified a partnership with Scotland's Censis Innovation Center for IoT, sensor and imaging technologies. Censis will assist Cannon and Quillien with research and product development, specifically to enhance data transfer from rural sensor networks to the cloud, via satellite, making data collection more timely, efficient and cost-effective.
Censis Senior Business Development Manager Craig Fleming said that R3-IoT brings a "game-changing" technology to market. "R3-IoT gives businesses the opportunity to understand their operations where previously it wasn't technologically feasible or economically viable," he said. "What R3-IoT is doing underlines the transformative potential of IoT and the hidden value it can unlock in companies, whether they are tech-focused or operating in more traditional industries."