Like many industries, the distribution market is changing with the advent of new technologies. However, some aspects of the business stay the same. Vehicles are still needed to transport goods, and methods of tracking those goods are still important.
With a new funding round and a number of patents, Richardson-based Polte Corporation is looking to upgrade tracking software from its more traditional reliance on GPS to harness the connectivity and power of cloud technology.
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“There’s this huge explosion in IoT in the last ten years; when you think back on it, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before,” said Polte CEO Ed Chao. “We’re enabling a super localized and secure way for enterprises to be able to track all the things that matter to them from source to destination.”
The company announced Tuesday that is has raised $12.5 million from private investors in a Series A-2. Leaders hope this will allow the company to focus on the deployment of their cloud location over cellular technology into commercial and industrial environments. Chao said Polte’s partners should begin deploying their hardware solutions by the end of the year.
According to Crunchbase.com, Polte raised about $6 million in its first Series A in September 2015.
"We’re going to blow GPS out of the water."
Polte has more than 75 patents or patents pending with its technology. Essentially, the company leverages 4G and 5G cell networks to track a product or vehicle’s location across a supply chain. Since the technology depends on the cloud rather than on a physical GPS chip, Chao said Polte’s product is more accurate, more secure, cheaper, and requires less power consumption to run.
“Businesses across all sectors and geographies know that location services are essential in enabling organizations to have unprecedented visibility into their assets and operations,” Chao said in a press release.
He said that Polte’s technology will help with changing trends in the distribution industry. With companies like Amazon, quick and cheap distribution is quickly becoming the expectation for consumers. Chao added that mobility as a service is becoming an emerging trend in the industry.
“I had time to reflect on the industry, and the things that were going on… When you start bringing these things together and you think about the [technology] you need to bring it forward…. It’s right at the intersection of these industry trends,” Chao said. “We’re going to blow GPS out of the water.”
