Everactive, a technology company that develops Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, announced today that it has acquired $35m of funding to develop its battery-free wireless sensors.
The funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing, and product development of the company’s battery-free wireless sensors to be used in the industrial sector.
Former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, said: “The industrial sector has eagerly awaited the data explosion promised by IoT solutions, but has been continually let down. By eliminating the need for batteries, Everactive can offer extremely scalable and cost-effective solutions for generating the data streams required to reap the full benefits of IoT. With self-sustaining sensors, retrofitting thousands of pieces of legacy equipment across a plant or refinery becomes a reality.”
Everactive’s end-to-end monitoring solutions target high-volume industrial assets that are currently unmonitored or under-monitored precisely because they exist in such high volume. Indeed, most plants are unwilling to place battery-powered sensors on thousands of motors, pumps, compressors, or steam traps; the logistical cost of adding thousands of items to a maintenance list is not only prohibitive, but also defeats the cost-saving purpose of those very sensors.
The company believes that by removing the battery from the sensor, they will enable the types of pervasive monitoring deployments long imagined, while cost-effectively digitising thousands of physical assets across a plant to maximise uptime, optimise maintenance costs, and improve environmental, health and safety.
Andres Bejarano, Technical Director, Global Home Care at Colgate-Palmolive Company, said: “Batteries represent a real barrier to deploying IoT at scale because of the inevitable replacement problem, especially in hard to reach areas. Everactive’s batteryless approach changes the thought process about how many sensors we can install throughout our factories, which translates into an influx of new data to help us operate more efficiently.”
Spun out of the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia in 2012, Everactive develops self-powered IoT systems. Everactive’s sensor devices generate enough power from small amounts of “harvested energy” to continuously measure, process, and wirelessly transmit equipment and infrastructure health data from a range of industrial assets.
