Location technology company Polte Corporation announced it has raised $12.5 million in strategic funding from “experienced private investors.”
The Series A-2 funding will allow the company to focus on deployments on commercial and industrial applications with its patented alternative to GPS. A spokesperson confirmed the names of the investors are not being released.
“This round of funding from committed and seasoned investors enables us to expand our team to deploy and deliver our affordable, accurate and secure location services,” said Polte’s CEO Ed Chao in a statement. “Businesses across all sectors and geographies know that location services are essential in enabling organizations to have unprecedented visibility into their assets and operations. Polte technology is less expensive to deploy at scale, an order of magnitude more accurate, and more secure than current approaches to location information.”
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Chao previously told FierceWireless that Polte’s location technology is the most accurate out there; it uses the cellular network and the cloud to serve IoT devices. Plus, it’s lower cost and offers longer battery life than alternatives. Use cases include embedding Polte technology in packages to track them from the warehouse to the doorstop, serving financial services by putting it in a credit card or even into expensive articles of clothing that people don’t want to lose.
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Polte—a play on “positioning” and LTE—says its technology is optimized to leverage 4G and 5G signals, functioning both indoors and outdoors for precise and secure asset tracking. The company brought Chao on board as CEO last year. He served as a senior technology executive at prepaid firm MetroPCS and stayed at T-Mobile for about a year after T-Mobile acquired MetroPCS in 2013. That transaction and integration has been held up as an example of how T-Mobile would handle its integration with Sprint if that deal survives an attempt by states to block it in court.
“I’ve been investing in Polte since its inception,” said Ken Thompson, chairman of the board at Polte, in a press release. “The investors are all committed to the company’s growth given the confidence we have in the technology and the company that Ed Chao and team have built. There’s no question Polte is delivering on its promise to bring to market a disruptive location technology that will transform a range of industries.”
Polte has more than 75 patents and patents pending.