WorldSensingis a Catalan company founded in 2008 that offers Iot software and hardware solutions. The company currently offers two types of products: on the one hand Loadsensing, a solution that allows monitoring large infrastructures in the Civil Engineering, Mining, Oil and Gas sectors at a minimum cost; on the other hand Fastprk, the leading smart parking solution in the market; and Bitcarrier, a product that improves traffic management and urban mobility with real-time monitoring of vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
Worldsensing closed 2016 with a staff of 48 people, and currently has 73, most of them in Barcelona, as well as small commercial offices in London and Los Angeles. The company had a turnover of €4.7M in 2016 and expects to achieve sales of between €8M and €10M in 2017.
Before closing this latest round of investment, the company had already received funding amounting to €7M. Investors that backed the company include Kibo Ventures, Cisco Investments, Mitsui & Co, Endeavor Catalyst and Fundación José Manuel Entrecanales and Finaves. This combination of financial and strategic investors has been decisive for the company to strengthen and grow in Europe and North and South America.
The new €8.3M investment round was led by McRock Capital, a fund specialising in the internet of things, ETF Partners, a European fund specialising in sustainability, and Cisco Investments, which had already invested in the company in 2015.
The new funds will be used for further growth: in 2018, "we will lay the foundations for business development in the US and Asia," explains the CEO. "It's a commitment to aggressive growth. There is opportunity in the market, and we have found a blue ocean, there is no global competition. There is a lot of noise in smart cities, but nobody is doing complete digitisation, from hardware to intelligence.
McRock Capital's entry into the company is a great opportunity as an Iot-focused fund. The Toronto-based fund, founded in 2010, has already made 10 deals in the sector. So far no exits. Below we show you the operations carried out by the investor in the last year.
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