Awarepoint Raises $10M to Accelerate Its Sensor Network for Hospitals

JAFCO Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, has stepped in as lead investor in a $10 million round announced today by San Diego’s Awarepoint, which provides wireless sensor systems to help hospitals monitor the real-time location of equipment and patients. Existing investors Cardinal Partners and Venrock Associates joined in the Series E round.

As I explained last year, Awarepoint uses ZigBee-based devices that plug into ordinary power outlets to create a wireless mesh sensor network that encompasses an entire medical center. The system provides real-time tracking of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that are embedded in patient wristbands and attached to medical instruments.

Awarepoint says the capital infusion will be used to accelerate its development of new technology and products, and to help the company market its capabilities. The company was founded in 2002. As part of the financing, JAFCO Ventures general partner Tom Mawhinney will join Awarepoint’s board. The Palo Alto venture firm is affiliated with Tokyo-based JAFCO, the private equity firm previously known as Japan Associated Finance Co.

Awarepoint CEO Jason Howe told me last year the company has raise more than $24 million from investors, lenders, and in vendor financing. Awarepoint did not identify a previous investor, San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, as a participant in the latest round, and the company no longer lists Avalon’s Steve Tomlin as a board member on its website.

Tomlin tells me by e-mail this morning: “We do still have an Observer seat and stay actively involved. Avalon is always delighted when our companies attain a level of maturity that they don’t need us on the Board—and, to the delight of our investors and ourselves, it frees Avalon’s partners’ time to engage in more early-stage-oriented activities…”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.