ioSphere makes first SWARM sale to NIWA, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
You could be forgiven for thinking the ioSphere team was optimistic about starting a new tech business in the midst of a global pandemic and a global component shortage, but the company has just delivered its first income - after only 7 months of operation!
In mid-2021, ioSphere was founded to create universal IoT gateways for the brand new Swarm satellite network. In October, we closed a pre-seed funding round and moved into new offices in central Christchurch to get started.
Our talented engineers then worked tirelessly to complete the electronics, firmware, and antenna designs for our first gateway by March, and then jumped right into a series of highly innovative product trials. Some of these were world-first Swarm applications.
Our first pilot, a direct connection to a solar microgrid on a dairy farm, went well, and we moved on to integrate with a weather station on a remote vineyard. Our third pilot involved connecting a massive transformer to a live substation, and our fifth involved monitoring water quality at New Zealand's largest mine. Along with all of that, we were the first to use Swarm to retrieve a vehicle's OBD (on board engine telemetry) data on all of the cars in the staff car park.
This product R and D took the ioSphere team just 6 months, and it culminated this week in one of the most significant milestones for any start-up business: our first real revenue!
Even better, our first paying customer is the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, NIWA, one of New Zealand's largest scientific organisations. NIWA monitors a wide range of environmental parameters on land, in the oceans, and in the atmosphere. Few organisations in the world have more expertise in remote instrumentation monitoring.
"Working with NIWA has been very rewarding," says Aidan Barnsdale, ioSphere’s head of hardware. "They are great people who are excited about the potential of the new Swarm network to support their scientific programmes and who are extremely supportive of small Kiwi businesses developing innovative technologies."
NIWA has purchased an ioSphere gateway, with a 12-month subscription to the Swarm network. NIWA will be able to test the ease of integration of ioSphere's gateway with their Unidata data loggers, the reliability and data throughput of ioSphere's hardware, and the overall performance of the Swarm network as part of this paid pilot.
"Rod Mckay from NIWA has been fantastic to work with," says Donna Henderson, ioSphere’s business development manager, "we're so excited to be able to demonstrate our technology to an organisation as influential as NIWA. We believe that environmental monitoring applications will be a large market for Swarm in the future."