Two of Ireland’s IoT specialists have merged following the acquisition of Firmwave by Wexford-based Taoglas.
Taoglas, a provider of antennas and radiofrequency (RF) solutions for the internet of things (IoT), has announced its second acquisition of the year. Staying local, the Wexford company said it had snapped up Firmwave, an IoT product design firm and a former Siliconrepublic.com Start-up of the Week.
In a statement, Taoglas said the move is part of its efforts to bolster its design engineering for complex IoT applications such as facial recognition, centimetre-level positioning, speech recognition, and AI for motion sensing and analysis.
“Customers have long been asking Taoglas for more engineering support for their IoT solution. They now want a one-stop-shop for IoT engineering services,” said Ronan Quinlan, the company’s co-CEO and co-founder.
“They don’t want to deal with multiple engineering teams, as they do today, to create each component of next-generation IoT solutions. We are seeing increasingly complex IoT projects that are being delayed to market by this fundamental problem.”
Both companies have collaborated a number of times before with Taoglas collaborating with Firmwave on Taoglas Shift, an AI beam-steering antenna system for 5G networks. There has also been much collaboration on other complex custom IoT projects such as medical device maker HealthBeacon.
“We are excited to integrate our next-generation IoT design expertise and products into Taoglas,” said Adrian Burns, CEO of Firmwave.
“They have a global reputation for high-quality products. Their scale and unparalleled sales channels will accelerate the deployment of our hardware and software solutions. Our customers will now benefit from access to the world-class Taoglas engineering team and their RF solutions portfolio.”
Back in January, Taoglas announced it had acquired the US firm ThinkWireless for an undisclosed sum. Headquartered in Coconut Creek, Florida, it produced antenna systems to incorporate two or more frequency bands, including those for SiriusXM satellite radio, GPS, AM/FM, weather band, DAB, HDTV, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LTE.
The ThinkWireless facility became the Irish company’s ninth design and development centre globally, and the third in the US, alongside centres in San Diego and Minneapolis.