Iotera today announced the closing of a $1M financing round led by ZenShin Capital Partners and joined by Crunchfund, Startup Capital Ventures, String Ventures, EarlyMarket and Rubicon Venture Capital. The funding will be used to expand delivery of their IOTA pet tracking system. While the GPS-enabled tracking product will help protect and locate bikes, cars, children and more, many consumers are ordering them for use as a pet tracker to help prevent lost cats and dogs.
Iotera launched a successful Kickstarter campaign in July of 2014, taking in more than $280,000 of pre-orders for the world’s smallest and longest battery life real-time GPS tracking device, and the only long range tracker which has no monthly service fees.
Once the product launches, consumers will be able to keep track of their valuables over much of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City and other large metropolitan areas through Iotera’s unique crowd-sourced wireless network. Iotera’s network coverage will rapidly expand to other geographies as each IOTA establishes its own coverage area making it ideal for both urban areas as well as remote areas that have little or no cellular coverage. .
Ben Wild, CEO of Iotera discussed the rapid adoption of the network by stating:
“There are multiple markets that our technology can serve today, but to begin with we are focused on the pet tracking application with our tiny GPS tracker that has 10x improvement in battery life compared to any other product we are aware of. While pet tracking is our first key application, we are already seeing consumers interested in using our technology for other applications such as tracking children, elderly, cars and bicycles. We are excited by how quickly this application is driving total coverage of key cities in the US.”
Clancey Stahr, managing partner at venture capital firm Zenshin Capital, commented on the closing:
“After surveying the IoT landscape, we were convinced that pet tracking was an underserved market due to poor battery life of devices and unattractive monthly fees. We loved the idea of building a proprietary IoT network to eliminate carrier fees and a unique protocol to carefully conserve power”.
Iotera is currently taking pre-orders for the Iota GPS pet tracker and is targeting delivery of the product in the summer of this year.
Have a crowdfunding offering you'd like to share? Submit an offering for consideration using our Submit a Tip form and we may share it on our site!