Startup Veniam Builds “Internet of Moving Things”

Startup: Veniam

What they do: This startup’s goal is an ambitious one. Veniam intends to create the “Internet of Moving Things” by creating citywide vehicular networks that turn cars, buses and trucks into moving WiFi hotspots that connect these vehicles, mobile objects, and their end users to the Internet and to each other.

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA 

CEO: João Barros, who also co-founded Streambolico.

Founded: 2012

Funding: To date, the company has received $6 million in angel, venture, and grant funding. Last week, Veniam locked down a $4.9 million Series A funding round led by True Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Cane Investments, and private investors. Veniam also won the $500K grand prize of the MIT Portugal Building Global Innovators venture competition, run by MIT and ISCTE and sponsored by Caixa Capital.

Problem they tackle: IoT, vehicle telematics, and even location-based apps, such as Waze, are already starting the march towards real in-vehicle communications – communication of the type that doesn’t inspire near homicidal rage in people when they see you texting while driving and then swerving at the last minute to miss a pedestrian.

Figuring out how to guarantee continuous in-vehicle connectivity, while also channeling interactions so they walk the tightrope between helpful and dangerous is a real challenge. Moreover, in business environments, ensuring that work-related traffic isn’t drowned out by people trading snapshots of cats is another challenge.

Please Tweet: Startup Veniam seeks to create an “Internet of Moving Things.” via @JWVance, http://wp.me/p330ZZ-2g 

What I like about them: Gartner predicts IoT will grow 30 percent in the next year, from 3.8 to 4.9 billion connected things. While it is exciting that the IoT is expanding, there is also an impending problem of bandwidth and network availability. Where will a billion more devices and sensors connect to share their data? Can cellular networks do the job when they are already constrained, highly congested, and expensive? And how can we leverage the fact that most data, particularly that which comes from things rather than people, does not need be sent the second it is generated?

Next, consider the user experience. When millions of connected things located in the same crowded geography start exchanging data with one another and with the cloud, the user experience will be frustrating if not mediated and optimized, and the overall signal-to-noise ratio will be vexingly low. Consider it as akin to a sports fan trying to share a photo online in a stadium where 50,000 other fans are doing the exact same thing.

That frustration multiplies when you’re trying to actually be productive, such as pulling up plans on a construction site or updating a manifest in a seaport.

Building on existing standards currently in use by the transportation industry, Veniam has developed and implemented missing network mechanisms that allow vehicles to connect to heterogeneous networks, leverage multi-hop communications effectively, hand off active sessions seamlessly among different access networks (including cellular and vehicular WiFi), secure vital machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, and manage delay-tolerant data.

Taken together, these features add up to what Veniam calls the “Internet of Moving Things,” or WiFi networks distributed across urban centers and controlled spaces. Veniam provides low-cost WiFi across cities, as well as facilitating the collection of data sets to address environmental concerns, respond to real-time public transportation needs, and even manage specific tasks, such as adjusting waste collection routes dynamically. In controlled spaces, Veniam keeps workers and assets securely connected and gives logistics operators access to real-time data and two-way communications that improves the overall efficiency of their operations.

In addition, Veniam delivers technology that allows operators to monitor and control the network from the cloud, allowing them to update the firmware remotely and continuously improve system performance.

Customers: Early customers include City of Porto, Portugal and Port of Leixões, which is near Porto, Portugal.

Competitive Landscape: This is a pretty wide open space, touching on a range of competing solutions, including everything from metro WiFi to mesh networks to sensor networks to M2M communications to IoT infrastructure.

Veniam defines their competition a bit more narrowly, though it’s still a broad swath of indirect competitors. Veniam believes the most serious competition will come from vendors in four overlapping categories: chipset manufacturers, telematics vendors, OEMs in partnership with car manufacturers, and telecom operators.

Veniam argues that its long-term competitive advantage is vehicular networking software that builds on the IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle communication standard and leverages the 5.9 GHz band, which has been allocated for intelligent transportation systems in U.S., E.U., and elsewhere.

Competitive Landscape: This is a pretty wide open space, touching on a range of competing solutions, including everything from metro WiFi to mesh networks to sensor networks to M2M communications to IoT infrastructure.

Veniam defines their competition a bit more narrowly, though it’s still a broad swath of indirect competitors. Veniam believes the most serious competition will come from vendors in four overlapping categories: chipset manufacturers, telematics vendors, OEMs in partnership with car manufacturers, and telecom operators.

Veniam argues that its long-term competitive advantage is vehicular networking software that builds on the IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle communication standard and leverages the 5.9 GHz band, which has been allocated for intelligent transportation systems in U.S., E.U., and elsewhere.

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