a group of European investors led by Munich Venture Partners, the VC partner of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute of applied research. The other investors are Investec, a London-based specialty bank, Aeris Capital, with offices in the U.S. and Switzerland, Menlo Park, CA-based Rembrandt Ventures, and San Diego-based Windward Ventures.
Proximetry is not expected to require any additional venture funding, Trent says, aside from some smaller angel investments (including one in July) that were needed to provide a company match to grants awarded by the European Union. The company became profitable this year, and plans to announce a couple of “significant partnerships” at the GridWeek 2010 conference on “smart grid” technology and advances, which is set to begin October 18 in Washington D.C.
The AirSync software platform is expected to be available for customers later this year, Trent says. The company has done much of its software development in Poland. While Proximetry has about 70 employees, Trent says only 15 are working at the startup’s San Diego headquarters.
If Trent has made the right bet, the biggest deployments of wireless technology—and the biggest opportunity for innovation—might not be in the legions of consumer cell phones and smart mobile devices, or the wireless networks that support them. Instead, it could prove to be in millions of wireless sensors and monitors, along with all the supporting private network infrastructure, for the pervasive-but unglamorous job of monitoring the electrical grid.
