Top IoT Startups of 2021

Top-Iot-Startups-2021-Banner

The IoT (Internet of Things) sector is currently booming, as the world continues to welcome in automation, connectivity and big data – the IoT’s global market set to reach a valuation of $1319.08 billion by the year 2026 (Verified Market Research).

With the sector thriving, more and more innovative startups have begun to emerge, benefiting users in a vast array of different ways.

Here, TechRound explores some of the top IoT startups to watch in 2021 and beyond…

 

The Top IoT Startups to Watch:

  • Magic – Founded by Varun Bhanot, Sunil Jindal and Craig Wiltshire
  • ClickASnap – Founded by Tom Oswald
  • BrainBox AI – Founded by Jean-Simon Venne and Sean Neely
  • Quantum Integration – Founded by Michael Barnick
  • ShelterZoom – Founded by Chao Cheng Shorland and Allen Alishahi
  • WeMaintain – Founded by Benoit Dupont, Jade Francine and Tristan Foureur
  • Kepler Vision Technologies – Founded by Dr Harro Stokman
  • Radix IoT – Chief Executive Officer Fred Dirla
  • Mila – Founded by Chris Viatte

 

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

techround

 

Magic, Founded by Varun Bhanot, Sunil Jindal and Craig Wiltshire

 

Iot-MAGIC-workout-product

 

Magic is an elegant home gym that uses computer vision cameras, the world’s smartest dumbbells and 3D sensors to deliver gamified personal training hyper-personalised to your body. It is billed as the “Peloton of Strength Training”.

Magic recently secured backing from Virgin Startup and Silicon Valley’s OnDeck. They are a majority under-represented founding team comprised of minorities, a former paralympian and Head of Training at Royal Marines. Along with Computer Vision + Hardware engineering experience who previously launched British innovations Gravity jetpack and Brompton e-bike.

Co-founder Varun Bhanot’s fitness journey started in his early 20s – “I drank and ate way too much” Bhanot recalls “and was seriously overweight. I was told I needed to make a big change to avoid future health problems.” After working with the best strength coaches in London, Bhanot dramatically lost 25% body fat and was in the best shape ever.

Magic are now on a mission to help 1,000s of others improve their health outcomes without it costing £100s a week in personal training fees. MAGIC brings the 1:1 hyper-personalised personal training experience into the home with world class coaches delivering coaching paired with IoT equipment.

It includes computer vision cameras that gives you live feedback, counts your reps and corrects your form just like a real personal trainer. Paired with the startup’s patent-pending smart dumbbells or ‘SmartBells’ that have similar technology to the Nintendo Wii with motion sensing technology embedded.

For the first time ever, you get data-driven insights into time under tension, range of motion and your pace. It’s more accurate than if a human PT was there with you.

Magic launched this year as the at-home fitness trend has accelerated for the future and the market demands more personalised, at-home, on-demand wellbeing solutions – powered by IoT.

 

ClickASnap, Founded by Tom Oswald

 

Tom-Oswald-ClickASnap-founder

 

ClickASnap is the only photo-sharing site in the world that pays its users. It became a multimillion pound business during lockdown with people seeking out extra ways to earn money, sharing their photos and receiving money back per view.

ClickASnap uses monetisation methods from video sites like YouTube and social media management systems like Hootsuite and applies them to its platform.

They ban algorithms meaning that, unlike Facebook and Instagram, every single post is as organically visible as it can be, helping users earn as much money from their pictures as possible.

ClickASnap vet photos and allow users to maintain the rights to their art and disable the print screen button to prevent lifting images from the site. It offers free cloud storage too and organic reach for people wanting to share their brand, as well as anyone who enjoys taking pictures.

In 2020, 30,000 users signed up to share photos. Today, the site has more than eight million images and an average of 150,000 users a day with 400,000 images viewed per day and growing rapidly. It had 30,000 sign ups in Sept 2020 and 2,215,960 in Sept 2021. The turnover last year was £36k; this year it is £1.6m.

They have paid out more than £250k in royalties to date. www.clickasnap.com.

 

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

techround

 

BrainBox AI, Founded by Jean-Simon Venne and Sean Neely

 

Jean-Simon-Venne-BrainBox-AI

 

BrainBox AI is accelerating the real estate revolution with its pioneering cloud-based clean technology for buildings. Launched in May 2019, Brainbox AI’s flagship product uses artificial intelligence to seamlessly upgrade existing commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The scalable technology enables buildings to become more sustainable and autonomous while reducing energy costs, decreasing emissions, improving day-to-day comfort, cutting down on maintenance, and extending equipment life.

Existing HVAC systems in commercial buildings are outdated and inefficient. They contribute to high maintenance costs, utility bills, and greenhouse gases. In fact, 35% of US buildings’ total energy consumption is due to their HVAC systems – and much of this is simply wasted.

The BrainBox AI solution combats this by combining artificial intelligence and cloud computing to create a fully autonomous commercial HVAC solution. The technology’s prediction models are built using the LSTM deep-learning structure to accurately predict temperatures by adding third-party sources (e.g. weather, occupancy, and utility tariff structure) to internal data sets. It then optimises individual HVAC equipment in real-time, permitting the existing infrastructure to become predictive and self-adaptive.

To date, BrainBox AI has impacted over 100 million sq. ft. of commercial real estate spanning 5 continents, reducing their emissions by 20 – 40% and lowering their energy bills by up to 25%. Most recently, BrainBox AI was announced as one of 10 companies globally chosen to showcase at the Tech For Our Planet challenge program, an initiative at the upcoming 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26).

In 2020, BrainBox AI was recognised by TIME as one of the Top 100 best inventions and by CB Insights as one of the Top 100 AI start-ups redefining industries in 2021. The company is also a member of the MaRS Discovery District, the largest urban innovation hub in North America.

 

Quantum Integration, Founded by Michael Barnick

 

Quantum-Integration-founder-Michael-Barnick

 

The Story of Quantum Integration started with Michael Barnick, the company’s founder. Michael was an engineer at Apple Computers, leading UX and Encryption projects for Steve Jobs. He eventually left Apple to become a founder at SonicWall which was acquired by Dell in 2012. Many years and start-ups later, he founded a high-end home automation company called Quantum Integration in 2008.

As an engineer at heart, Michael always wanted to build his own smart home, and finally did so around 2010. During construction however, he learned that integrating IoT efficiently was overly complicated and extremely costly. He immediately realised that the market needed a simple and cost-effective integration solution that did not require programming or expensive proprietary equipment.

These cumulative experiences resulted in the creation and re-invention of Quantum Integration in 2018, with the vision of easily connecting a device to anything electronic and make it “Smart,” without requiring a lot of engineering knowledge, and with the added power of IoT automation and Smart Home technology at an affordable price!

The company’s simple drag-and-drop app creation process allows users to control their device from a central location, on anything you own that can run an app or a webpage. Also, their integration platform allows the simple creation of custom IoT devices, using add-on circuits and a central application Q-Server which allows simple programming of tasks to be performed using multiple networked devices.

Quantum is also a very powerful learning tool, and its educational potential is unlimited. It’s a plug-and-play solution with the ability to add customised circuits and network a sophisticated number of IoT devices without any need for programming.

 

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

techround

 

 

ShelterZoom, Founded by Chao Cheng Shorland and Allen Alishahi

 

Chao-Cheng-ShelterZoom-founder

 

ShelterZoom is the leading blockchain SaaS company that allows businesses to store documents, negotiate transactions and finalise contracts in a transparent and secure online ecosystem. The subscription-based service’s technology turns documents into secure intelligent assets that can be collaborated on or shared in real time, with privacy top-of-mind. As millions around the world face the new normal of conducting routine business virtually and working remotely, ShelterZoom launched its latest platform DocuWalkTM at the height of the pandemic with its innovative virtual negotiating and collaboration room to help businesses take their operations remote.

The early adopters of ShelterZoom and DocuWalk include a variety of small businesses, real estate, consulting, legal and media companies, as well as individuals who are adapting to the new way of conducting business or managing personal, confidential records. With DocuWalk, the world now has a fully integrated, fast communication, document and contract management platform they can trust as consumers begin to prioritise cybersecurity.

A market leader in blockchain and the 2021 Fintech Breakthrough Award Winner for Best Contract Management Platform, ShelterZoom is a prime example of a company that pivoted during the pandemic to accommodate remote work operations and unique partnerships. One such partnership includes ShelterZoom’s most recent collaboration is with the Vatican-affiliated Pontificio Istituto Orientale in Rome (PIO), which is digitising historical texts that are more than 400-500 years old to make them accessible for the first time to a global audience.

ShelterZoom is also about to launch its latest application 1Report which will help real estate agents capture leads and facilitate virtual transactions in a CARFAX-like document environment.

 

WeMaintain, Founded by Benoit Dupont, Jade Francine and Tristan Foureur

 

WeMaintain-IoT-founders

 

Based in London, Paris and Singapore and founded in 2017, WeMaintain is redefining the property sector with IoT solutions to complement mixed building use and smart city design.

Anticipating the need for digitalisation in real estate, WeMaintain developed an end-to-end, tech-enabled solution for building owners and engineers, deploying proprietary IoT technologies to inform building use, maintenance and customer experience.

WeMaintain brings the best people and technology into buildings to support critical infrastructure, starting with elevators and escalators. Here, smart sensors gather data to measure building use, predict repairs, and support critical building functions. This ‘technology-agnostic’ IoT, is hosted on a private cloud, disconnected from the central building network for a more secure IT system.

WeMaintain is driving change in property, moving the sector from a disjointed ecosystem of legacy technologies and processes, towards a uniform, digitised end-to-end solution connecting engineers with building owners.

Consequently, WeMaintain’s information on traffic, occupancy rates, inter-floor flow and unit usage data enables asset managers to make informed decisions, improving efficiency and customer experience.

Over a six-month maintenance period, WeMaintain cuts the number of breakdowns by three. Three-quarters of WeMaintain callouts are carried out in less than two hours—half the four-hour average. The company now has 110 employees and expanded its operations to include fire systems with the 2021 acquisition of the fire alarm company, Shokly.

Clients include CBRE, Colliers International and Cushman & Wakefield. WeMaintain serves Allianz real estate lifts in Paris, Workspace lifts in London, and has installed it’s IoT solutions to escalators and elevators on the Docklands Light Railway after becoming a client of KeolisAmey Docklands. As WeMaintain enters Asia and eyes the US, the only way is up.

 

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

techround

 

Kepler Vision Technologies, Founded by Dr Harro Stokman

 

Kepler-Vision-Technologies-founder-Dr-Harro-Stokman

 

Kepler Vision Technologies is a Dutch company which uses AI powered computer vision technology to look after the well-being of elderly people in care homes. It does this using its vision-based human activity recognition software – the Kepler Night Nurse solution (KNN).

Kepler Vision’s mission is to make the job of nurses operating in elderly care homes less stressful and more enjoyable by allowing them to focus on providing care. To achieve this the KNN solution analyses live video streams in the cloud, recognising if and when clients need care and automatically sending alerts to care staff’s devices accordingly.

Kepler can use any existing camera system to monitor patients without violating their privacy. It does this by sending video streams to the cloud to be “seen” by its computer vision algorithm, rather than to a terminal where staff can view the live streams. These streams are then analysed in real time in order to identify when a situation that requires assistance has occurred. Once it has, the software sends an alert to a care staff’s device of choice to inform them that a patient requires immediate help. In-depth reports are automatically generated by the system whenever an incident occurs.

Kepler Vision Technologies is a spinoff company from the University of Amsterdam. To date, it has received investment from organisations including UvA Ventures and the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs totaling over €3.9 million.

The company is headquartered in Amsterdam and employs 15 people with expertise across machine learning, computer vision and healthcare.

 

Radix IoT, Chief Executive Officer Fred Dirla

 

Fred-Dirla-CEO

 

The Radix IoT platform enables seamless connectivity for technology of all types, shapes, and sizes–from HVAC components to solar equipment, agriculture products, factory/industrial automation equipment, water management products and smart building enablement devices. Enterprises can streamline IoT deployment without having on-site, or specialised staff to build out a cloud ecosystem. Bi-directional communications, between the cloud and Mango Series 4, unify telemetry data from disjointed systems and equipment to drive analytics, AI, or ML engines while also allowing for remote diagnostics and control.

Radix IoT Mango Series 4 is the market’s most reliable IoT platform with ground-breaking capacity and analytical proficiency for large-scale institutional deployments. As the proven, reliable, and robust IoT platform for rapid deployment, it is feature-equipped, simple-to-operate, and the market’s most comprehensive platform facilitating OEMs and their customers’ proactive asset management and remote monitoring of commissioned equipment, transforming all types of technology into IoT-compatible infrastructure at a global scale.

Mango, coupled with the Radix IoT platform, offers the market’s most comprehensive set of tools for creating an inclusive IoT solution. Mango seamlessly allows any product to be network-enabled into a global ecosystem at the device level and build the desired customer or company-facing solution in the cloud. This allows enterprises a “plug-and-play” option, and a painless deployment–whether they have 1 site or 1000s distributed across the nation or the globe. The pandemic proved how invaluable IoT Platforms are as they enabled remote management and monitoring of unmanned critical facilities–keeping staff healthy and safe. The rapid innovation and development of Mango reached a larger application base, while accelerating the speed to market of new features.

Mango Series 4 offers an open connectivity philosophy that doesn’t limit end-users to vendor-specific technology choices–since many enterprises own existing systems and equipment. Its robust end-to-end connectivity, rock-solid distributed data collection capabilities, and massive scale data storage has an unbeatable data visualisation engine.

 

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

techround

 

Mila, Founded by Chris Viatte

 

Mila-Founder-Chris-Viatte

 

Zürich-based Mila is the European leader of on-demand IoT technical support, operating in the UK, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Austria.

Using trained and vetted Mila Friends and licensed Mila Pros, Mila serves to enhance the image of major consumer brands by enabling them to amplify the sales cycle through in-home installations and free smart home consultations that often result in selling additional products.

The growing list of Mila’s enterprise partners is currently more than 35 and includes Google Home, Amazon, Amazon Key for Business, Samsung, Bosch, Ring, Otto, Netgear, Netatmo, Sonos, and Logitech, among others.

As the smart home ecosystem becomes more complex, services such as Mila will become mainstream, offering subscription options that include everything from remote troubleshooting, device integration, and onsite battery replacement. Though touted by some brands, DIY is not always a perfect scenario when multiple IoT devices are adopted in residential or commercial environments.

Mila CEO and founder Chris Viatte notes, “Even when initiatives such as MATTER are common with major brand IoT devices, skilled and professional installers and troubleshooters, will be needed by the consumer.”

Mila’s enterprise partners look to Mila to enhance their brand and increase sales. They consider Mila a trusted partner that can provide on-demand installations in a timely manner where they are unable to, or where it does not make sense for them to offer these services as part of their business model.

Mila’s trained technicians are uniquely positioned to offer a wide selection of brand options and to recommend products that suit the customers’ genuine needs. A physical presence in customer homes allows Mila to make the best product recommendations where a retailer may not.

Services such as Mila will be critical to smart home adoption and the adoption of IoT devices for residential and commercial environments.