LATYS, a startup delivering a drop-in antenna that extends wireless signals without interference, has announced its [$3 million (€2.80 million)] seed financing from investor Rhapsody Venture Partners (Rhapsody) with participation from existing investor, TandemLaunch Ventures. The funds will support production and commercial launch of the first-generation product for customers where existing wireless solutions hit range and interference limits.
The funding arrives as LATYS completed field trials that proved their metasurface antennas enable more than 4x increase in throughput for existing router networks, without creating any interference. LATYS’ technology is signal agonistic and expected to find broad adoption in 5G, IoT, Wi-Fi, and Industry 4.0.
LATYS’ antenna technology utilises a metasurface to repeat wireless signals, without any processing by passively focusing the signal. Customers with existing Wi-Fi networks can resolve dead zone issues simply by placing LATYS metasurface antennas as signal repeaters. They can also resolve interference and reliability issues in mesh networks, by replacing mesh routers with LATYS’ passive antennas. In field tests, LATYS antennas have improved throughput in dead zones by over 300%.
Unlike traditional mesh networks and router extenders which emit omnidirectional signals along congested frequencies such that every “hop” halves bandwidth and creates inescapable interference and latency, the patented LATYS antenna isolates signals in space to optimise bandwidth delivery for any signal, from sub-7 GHz to mmWave 5G. The device uses “off-the-shelf” components, fits a thin and small form factor, and slashes network energy usage by more than 8x.
“Controlling the flow of information in space is the key to unlocking next generation wireless network performance,” says Paul Tornatta, CEO LATYS. “LATYS’ metasurface antennas put the energy in the network where it needs to be, when it needs to be there rather than broadcasting over large areas. We call this technique Intelligent Spatial Multiplexing. We’re very excited to be working with Rhapsody Venture Partners and TandemLaunch to bring this technology to fruition.”
“From your home network, to challenging industrial use cases, wireless networks are at or beyond breaking points. Everyone knows of their experience of a dropped or latent signal. What is an inconvenience for your facetime call, is a critical issue in many infrastructures. Existing solutions throw more active signal processing devices at the problem, which means you’ve created new interference. LATYS’ antennas blew us away, because they took a completely different approach,” says Bernard Lupien, general partner at Rhapsody. “We’ve looked at more than a dozen wireless network startups, and were amazed at what LATYS has accomplished. We are thrilled to partner with the LATYS team as they redefine wireless networks.”
“What the LATYS team has developed over the last two years is impressive and we’re delighted to continue our support in the commercialisation of their product,” says Helge Seetzen, general partner at TandemLaunch.
For more information about LATYS, contact team@latys.ca.
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