The Australian Government’s Future Fund has become the lead investor in a $US30m funding round for Santa Clara based EverActive (formerly PsiKick) which has developing energy harvesting technology to power IoT devices.
(The new name may not have been the best choice: it is shared by a Polish battery manufacturer)
Other new investors were Blue Bear Capital and ABB Technology Ventures. They joined existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Osage University Partners. The investment takes EverActive’s total fundraising to $US63m.
The company says will use the proceeds from the funding to meet the growing customer demand for its current and future products.
Complete devices
EverActive’s products are not simply energy harvesting devices but complete devices for specific purposes, including communications and onboard processing — all powered by harvested energy.
Its devices are claimed to use a mix of standards compliant and proprietary radio technologies to enable communication at multiple megabits per second over several kilometres, and integrated programmable processors to extract information locally.
It also claims to have developed “all the networking, software, and cloud analytics to be able to deliver insights to customers.
Its first product, launched in late 2018, was “designed to continuously monitor the pervasive industrial and district energy steam trap in order to determine whether or not the trap has failed so that maintenance personnel can act to minimise costly energy waste and safety concerns.”
The company’s initial target market is the industrial sector, where, it says “collecting and analysing data on equipment and infrastructure can have a profound and measurable impact: reducing downtime, cutting maintenance costs, improving safety and environmental impact, and boosting overall efficiency.”
Its latest product, currently in small-scale deployments is a machine health monitor that analyses vibration on rotating equipment, such as industrial motors, pumps, and fans.
EverActive also offers a flare monitor to mitigate the length and costs of flaring events in refineries.
Academic origins
EverActive says its co-founders, Benton Calhoun and David Wentzloff, have been working on ultra-low-power electronics since their days together at MIT’s Electrical Engineering & Computer Science program. “
In subsequent years, as professors at the University of Virginia and University of Michigan, respectively, the two continued to collaborate until several key proof points prompted them to spin the company out of the two research institutions,” it says.
