A start-up wireless sensor networking company that is eyeing the industrial automation space yesterday pulled off the technology industry's equivalent of horse racing's exacta: it disclosed the hiring of a new chief executive officer and the receipt of new financing.
Tendril Networks Inc. (Denver), which is developing a software framework for monitoring, managing, and integrating applications that run on low-power wireless sensor and control networks (WSCN), has hired Adrian Tuck as CEO. Tuck, who formerly worked on the executive team at Tendril's wireless chip partner, Ember Corp., succeeds Tendril's founder Tim Enwall, who was named chairman and chief operating officer.
The company also revealed that it has closed a "Series B" round of $5.25 million in financing that was led by Boulder, CO, venture capital firm Vista Ventures. Also participating in the financing were existing institutional investors Access Venture Partners, Appian Ventures, and angel investors, which together provided the company's original $1.75 million in seed funding in late 2004.
Yesterday's developments come as wireless networking vendors push to get industrial companies and other prospective customers to move beyond basic pilots and begin testing the technology in production environments. Tendril is doing its part by providing development tools and a framework to help organizations build and manage WSCNs that can be more cost-effectively deployed in a variety of applications, Tuck said in an interview.
"People by and large have solved data reliably from A to B. Tendril is all about next phase -- how to make it work in a real-world environment," Tuck said. "The next order is how to monitor a network when it is in place and how to know that no one is hacking it, or how to manage it to improve reliability and throughput [for] firmware updates and to make sure it is integrated [with] existing industrial automation systems. Tendril is about the second wave: monitoring, managing, and improving [WSCN] reliability."
Glen Allmendinger, president of Harbor Research Inc., a market research and consulting firm that focuses on pervasive computing and global networking, called the developments at Tendril "significant," in an e-mail exchange with MA. "This really is the coming out party for wireless sensor middleware," he noted.
The capital infusion will be used to hire applications engineers who can work with customers conducting field trials, and to expand Tendril's core engineering organization, Tuck explained. "We also intend to hire a couple of sales and marketing people to spread the word," he added.
Without divulging exact numbers, Tuck said the 14-person company would expand to roughly 30 employees during the next year or so. The $5.25 million infusion, Tuck said, is enough to get Tendril through what he expects will be an 18- to 24-month period of vigorous wireless network piloting with minimal product license revenue.
"We turned down money [in this round]," Tuck said. "The challenge when raising money is to take the amount needed to get to the next point -- shipping product and having happy customers. We felt with this amount [raised] ... we are in good shape."
Tendril sees its technology, which sits on top of ZigBee, 802.15.4, and proprietary 802.15.4-based wireless networks, fitting into a variety of device and facilities management applications that span the industrial automation, government, and agricultural sectors. Although slow to emerge, the pace of piloting is beginning to pick up in industrial segments such as oil and gas and other process manufacturing businesses, Tuck said. He said he is unable to reference customer names due to confidentiality arrangements, but noted that the types of applications being tested are focused primarily on predictive and preventive maintenance.
Tuck attributed the initial slowness to the usual suspects: industrial companies' reluctance to deploy advanced technologies until they are proven to be cost effective and, most importantly, reliable. For instance, many companies looking at wireless networks are doing so to reduce wiring costs. That cost savings could be wiped out with a second service call to a wireless networking vendor to get an engineer to troubleshoot a problem, he pointed out.
"With managing a plant or building system, companies are looking at an investment that will last 10 to 15 years, and therefore they need to get it right," Tuck said. "I've become hugely sensitive to that buying dynamic -- my customers want reliability over features."
Harbor Research's Allmendinger indicated that industrial and building controls are verticals that are most in need for what Tendril offer. "[These sectors] represent the lion's share of early adopters and are the poster child of pervasive wireless device networks," he wrote.
Tendril's distributed platform packages technological capabilities that enterprise developers, OEMs, and systems integrators previously had to build or buy individually. Tendril uses "request broker" technology to enable developers to build WSCNs that integrate different types of low-power sensors/actuators with networked computing systems. The framework includes an integrated enterprise-side and node-side programming interface, along with associated network bridging software, for monitoring, managing, and integrating WSCNs.
The company also has an alliance with Ember Corp. to provide an end-to-end ZigBee-ready platform aimed at making it easier for companies to develop applications for sensor-based mesh networks. The two companies also enjoy a close relationship -- in addition to Tuck's previous employment at Ember, Ember's founder, Dr. Robert Poor, is on Tendril's board.
Tuck said there are no other ties, financial or otherwise, between the two companies. Tendril, he said, is agnostic in terms of its chip alliances, pointing to the company's partnerships with Texas Instruments. Ember is a critical partner given its size and scope, he quickly added. Ember claims to command more than 75% of the fledgling embedded wireless networking chip market. (Read more about Ember.)
At present, Tuck doesn't see any direct competitors in the market place. "Our biggest competitor is the customer's in-house development team," Tuck said. "We are providing a framework and tools to accelerate their work."
But if Tendril's path is the right one, the company expects to have lots of competitors, as silicon and tethered and untethered networking vendors see the potential of creating a one-stop environment for building and managing WSCNs.
Tuck is poised for the competition, and is battle-tested. He wrote Ember's business plan when he joined the company at its inception in 2001, and was a member of the executive team working in a variety of capacities. Prior to joining Ember, Tuck was president of U.S. Operations and VP of marketing for Soft-ex, a call accounting software manufacturer, and was an executive at Connect Communications Group, serving most recently as VP of business development & marketing.
Tuck said he will focus primarily on commercial aspects of Tendril's business, a pursuit that aligns well with his sales and marketing background. Tendril founder Enwall will work on product strategy and the operational sides of the business.
"The reason I'm excited working with Adrian is that his skill set and mine map well together," Enwall said. "I'm a more product-oriented, analytical, and detail-oriented product strategy person. We will share the spokesman's role and speaking circuit."
Harbor Research's Allmendinger called Tuck's hire "strong coup" for Tendril given his background at Ember, where he most recently directed market strategy, and as interim CEO and executive vice President during the company's critical early-growth stages. "He was responsible for identifying and closing a major strategic deal with STMicroelectronics, the first in a series of important alliances with micro-controller manufacturers," Allmendinger pointed out.