Boston, Massachusetts & London, UK. December 12, 2011 — As first reported by M2M Now on Saturday 10 December, sources within SensorLogic have confirmed that investors in the Boston-based company have declined to extend additional funding to the company. Staff have been laid off and its operations have been closed down, writes Jeremy Cowan. SensorLogic has now reportedly received a bid from Gemalto for its service delivery platform and Intellectual Property.
A further round of venture capital (VC) funding had been attempted, but refused by existing investors. Mike Verinder, the former Quality Assurance Manager at SensorLogic told M2M Now, “We went in for another round of VC funding and the investors said ‘no’. All of the investors were approached for additional ‘runway funding’, we also had another ‘new’ investor who was planning to add close to US$4 million to the pot, but that investor pulled out at the last minute. The company met the next day to shut down operations and lay off all of its employees.”
To date, investors in SensorLogic have included Boston Millennia Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, Covera Ventures, and UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, and the SensorLogic Board of Directors includes Martin J Hernon of Boston Millennia Partners, and Dave McLean of Sevin Rosen Funds.
The former QA manager at SensorLogic also reports that one week after operations were shut down, Gemalto decided to buy much of SensorLogic’s intellectual property (IP) including its service delivery platform. If this deal is confirmed this will bring a significant new player into the platform market, competing with the likes of Axeda and Qualcomm’s nPhase. No announcement on the proposed sale has been made by SensorLogic and, when contacted today by M2M Now, a spokeswoman for Gemalto refused to confirm or deny the reports.
“SensorLogic had major contracts in place with AT&T, Diebold, and General Mills that were being developed,” said Verinder. It is thought that Gemalto was aiming to purchase SensorLogic’s platform to extend the lifeline of those contracts. But, he added, this task would be made all the harder if the acquirer “had not secured the IT team to support that code base.”
To read the initial news story, go to: http://www.iot-now.com/2011/12/10/3670-rumours-surround-the-future-of-sensorlogic-company-declines-to-comment/
Founded in 2002, SensorLogic described itself as the first company to deliver a cloud-based, wireless, machine-to-machine (M2M) service delivery platform to the market. Since its inception, the company has remained focused on delivering platforms for M2M applications. Its scalable platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software is designed to help the next generation of M2M applications – which SensorLogic has referred to as ‘M2M 2.0′ – to harness real-time intelligence from smart devices.
The company assembled an experienced team from the worlds of wireless, device software, RFID, M2M, converged networking, and location-aware mobile services.
SensorLogic’s platform is used by network operators, M2M service providers, systems integrators, original equipment manufacturers, and enterprise IT developers to build, deploy and manage privately-labelled M2M solutions in areas such as asset tracking, usage-based insurance and machine monitoring & service.
Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO) is a leading provider of digital security, with 2010 annual revenues of €1.9 billion and over 10,000 employees operating out of 87 offices and 13 Research & Development centres in 45 countries.
The Netherlands-incorporated company serves global demand for personal mobile services, identity protection, payment security, authenticated online services, cloud computing access, modern transportation, e-healthcare and e-government services. Gemalto does this by providing secure software, a wide range of secure personal devices, and managed services to wireless operators, banks, enterprises and government agencies.
Gemalto develops and supplies electronic passports and identity cards, two-factor authentication devices for online protection, smart credit/debit and contactless payment cards, as well as subscriber identification modules (SIM) and universal integrated circuit cards (UICC) in mobile phones. Also, in the emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) applications Gemalto is a supplier of wireless modules and machine identification modules (MIM). To operate these solutions and remotely manage the software and confidential data contained in the secure devices Gemalto also provides server platforms, consulting, training, and managed services to help its customers achieve their goals.
