A deep tech company which claims to improve the accuracy of GPS and other global satellite positioning systems ten-fold has doubled its headcount in the last 18 months.
FocalPoint, which appeared on our sister publication BusinessCloud’s TransportTech 50 ranking, says its technology can measure the direction of arrival of satellite signals on consumer grade technology for the very first time and deliver 10x improvement in accuracy, sensitivity and integrity of satellite positioning for any device.
It raised £6 million Series B funding from Draper Esprit – the listed venture capital firm now rebranded as Molten Ventures – early last year and has since rapidly grown its teams in the UK and US, where it has now launched.
It has now raised a £23m Series C round from a consortium of investors, co-led by Molten and Gresham House, to scale its customer support operations to meet the growing demands of equipment and chipset manufacturers, grow R&D teams and pursue opportunities in other radio technologies, including 5G and WiFi.
“We are delighted at this show of confidence in FocalPoint from new and established investors amidst a challenging market backdrop,” said CEO Scott Pomerantz, a GPS expert who joined last year.
“Our IP portfolio is strong. This injection of capital will enable us to move faster to meet the demands of several big customers in the US and South East Asia, and to accelerate our IP portfolio growth.”
Operating out of Cambridge and Bristol, FocalPoint’s founders are drawn from Cambridge University’s Experimental and Theoretical Physics department, BAE Systems and the European Space Agency.
Global satellite positioning systems currently face major inaccuracy problems caused by obscured, reflected and weak satellite signals. This is an increasingly pressing security concern with the rise of location-based services such as ride hailing, autonomous vehicles, robots and IoT devices, all of which rely on accurate positioning to be able to operate effectively and safely.
FocalPoint’s two flagship Supercorrelation and D-Tail technologies solve these problems, providing unprecedented accuracy for GNSS systems. When combined, the technologies provide centimetre-level positioning indoors and outdoors, with a large range of use-cases from consumer to business and government.
FocalPoint founder, president and CTO Ramsey Faragher commented: “It has been an amazing experience to grow this company from an idea in my head to an established and world-leading GNSS technology provider.
“As we continue to add more GNSS customers and partners to our list, I’m excited to be now developing further IP to grow our footprint into other radio technologies and even larger markets.”