Israeli company CoreTigo, which provides wireless connectivity solutions for industry, has announced a Series A investment of $10 million led by Qualcomm Ventures LLC and Sierra Ventures, who led the round, with participation by Magma Venture Partners, Cardumen Capital and Meron Capital. The current round brings the total raised by company to date to $12 million.
CoreTigo says that the financing will be used to accelerate the development of its core technology and IP, to further build end to end solutions, and expand CoreTigo's strategic and business partner ecosystem.
CoreTigo was founded in 2017 by its CEO Eran Zigman, Dan Wolberg and Ofer Blonskey. It serves dozens of customers around the world, among them Hilscher, Balluff and Siemens, and has 16 employees at its offices in Kadima-Tzoran in central Israel. The company would not divulge its revenue figures. It intends to use the funds raised to hire seven more people over the coming year in development and sales.
CoreTigo is developing wireless communications systems suitable for use in industrial automation. Connectivity between devices in industrial plants is currently mostly through fixed-line communications, since Bluetooth and WiFi connections are not sufficiently stable, secure and reliable for industrial use. The platform for connecting sensors and control systems that CoreTigo is developing is based upon the IO-Link Wireless communication standard, which is meant to provide wireless communications as reliable and stable as communications using fixed-lines.
Qualcomm's investment is financial in nature, but there is a strategic element to it, because of the potential for combining the two companies' technologies. "The rapidly evolving Industry 4.0 and Industrial IOT make CoreTigo's offering timely given their technology is targeting standard-based low power, low cost and robust wireless mission critical connectivity," said Boaz Peer, director at Qualcomm Ventures for Qualcomm Israel Ltd. "We believe it has great potential to impact the industrial space along with technologies like 5G which Qualcomm is making possible."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 5, 2019
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