Trinity spin-out Danalto raises €1m in seed funding

11 Mar 2021

Image: © Kit Leong/Stock.adobe.com

The IoT company has been backed by investors of Decawave, which was sold for $400m last year.

Last year, Irish chipmaker Decawave was acquired by US company Qorvo in a €400m deal after almost 13 years in business.

Now, angel investors who made huge gains from that sale have backed Trinity College Dublin (TCD) spin-out Danalto in a new €1m seed round, according to The Irish Times.

Danalto was founded by David McDonald, Tom Farrell and Albert Baker in 2017 and raised €750,000 in seed funding the following year.

The company was also one of 15 Irish tech start-ups accepted to join the Google Adopt a Startup Programme in May 2019.

The IoT company aims to make the adoption and deployment of IoT location services easier for enterprises.

Its platform puts a specific focus on low-energy, massive IoT devices, systems and applications to help create solutions for service creation, deployment and operation, targeting pain points in smart city infrastructure management.

According to Danalto, its platform provides highly accurate location and positioning intelligence, with less infrastructure and power requirements than traditional GPS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi solutions.

While GPS is widely deployed, Danalto said it is unable to provide location data for assets under covered areas or indoors. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are commonly used indoors but, due to their limited range and need for dense infrastructure, they become less effective outside.

Danalto’s platform aims to offer the best of both for indoor and outdoor settings. It does this by combining a distributed set of tracking capabilities across device, edge and cloud contexts by embedding positioning intelligence at the device and gateway, and orchestrating location services via the cloud.

The start-up said its platform is designed to use up to 10 times less infrastructure than traditional location service technologies and require five times less battery power, reducing operational cost.

Speaking to The Irish Times, Ciaran Connell, a co-founder of Decawave who now chairs Danalto, said the TCD spin-out will use the new €1m funding to increase its headcount from 10 to 30 by the end of 2021. He added that the company will open a Series A round this year.

Jenny Darmody is the editor of Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com