Socowave raises €3M to develop mobile wireless technology

Funding

Socowave, a company based at the NovaUCD incubator at University College Dublin, has secured €3 million in a first round of funding led by Balderton Capital.

The money will enable Socowave to accelerate the development of its wireless access system for mobile communications, which it says will substantially increases the data handling capacity of cellular radio infrastructure whilst reducing the energy consumption.

The company’s Active Antenna System technology allows the cellular base station to detect the direction of incoming signals from user groups and to actively optimise the radio. This new class of base station technology increases wireless data handling capacity five-fold, while reducing the energy consumption of the overall base station system by 50 per cent. It does this by eliminating inefficient base station components and locating certain elements inside the antenna housing.

Barry Maloney, Partner at Balderton Capital, will join the Socowave board.

Joe Moore, founder and Chief Executive of Socowave, said, “The mobile infrastructure industry is urgently seeking step-function improvements in radio access network performance as mobile operators struggle to cope with the massive uptake in Smartphone usage and its impact on their networks.

“This funding from Balderton Capital provides Socowave with resources to accelerate the development of our Active Antenna System technology platform, delivering a new class of radio access platform for 3G, LTE and 4G cellular networks.”

Maloney said, “Joe Moore and his team at Socowave are developing a truly disruptive wireless solution that will greatly enhance the performance of radio access networks for mobile communications by increasing the network capacity and reducing costs.”

Socowave is headquartered in NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre at University College Dublin, and its R&D centre is located in the National Software Centre, Cork. The company is supported by the government agency Enterprise Ireland.