TAIPEI, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The leading Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions provider Ubiik today announces that it has completed its US$5M Series A funding led by Taiwania Capital. The investment will fuel the global expansion of its industry-leading AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) technology and energy IoT solutions, as well as growing its promising cellular IoT business.
Based in Taipei and with offices in Silicon Valley and Osaka, Japan, Ubiik is the largest AMI vertical solutions provider for Taiwan's smart electricity meter deployment, the largest IoT project in Taiwan. By winning three consecutive tenders of Taiwan Power (Taipower), the "state-owned" electricity company, from 2018 to 2020 at a total value of US$45Mn, Ubiik is tasked to deploy its AMI system for 600,000 electricity meters by 2022, of which more than 200,000 are already online. Utilizing its breakthrough Weightless™ LPWAN wireless communication technologies and PaaS head-end system, Ubiik has managed to achieve more than 99% of success rate for meter data collection and set the benchmark for reliability and efficiency among all vendors. Since late 2019 Ubiik's vertical AMI solution has also successfully landed in Japan and is now expanding to markets in the US, India, Middle East, and the ASEAN countries.
"Ubiik has demonstrated to be not just a team with great technologies and can-do spirit, but also one with excellent business development capability that could deliver business success," said Cheng Wu, Taiwania Capital's general partner who have founded 4 successful start-up companies, including ArrowPoint Communications, which was sold to Cisco in 2020 for US$5.7Bn. "It is a rare company having the ability to design all the components of a complex system, including hardware, wireless connectivity, embedded software and cloud platform. In Ubiik, we see a leader in AMI and the enormous market potential in IoT and Electric Vehicles. Taiwania is honored to be a partner to shape that future".
"We are excited about having Taiwania Capital, the leading technology venture capital in Taiwan, becoming our investor, and a hugely respected and successful entrepreneur to be our strategic advisor," said Tien-haw Peng, Founder and CEO of Ubiik. "With the Series A financing and the industry insights and network that Cheng is bringing to our company, we are on the right track for expanding our successful story from Taiwan's AMI champion to a global energy IoT leader."
About Ubiik
Founded in 2016, Ubiik started its IoT business by providing Weightless™ LPWAN, a high performance open standard for bidirectional, fully synchronised, low-power wide area public or private networks, solutions. Since its successful AMI project in 2018 which has expanded its product portfolio to PaaS cloud platform and edge computing, Ubiik has become a vertical IoT solutions provider. It has since grown its connectivity offerings to include NB-IoT and LTE Cat-M to cover the multi-modality of the IoT market, especially for applications requiring the use of public cellular networks.
Ubiik is a team of nearly 70 members from more than 7 countries/regions located in Taiwan, US and Japan, and is expected to grow to 100 members by end of 2021 to meet the strong growth for its AMI, energy IoT, smart grid and EV related businesses.
About Taiwania Capital
Taiwania Capital is a venture capital firm founded in 2017 by the "National Development Fund of the Executive Yuan of Taiwan" and private enterprises.
We focus on investing in early-stage companies and have launched two funds during 2017-2018. Fund I was launched with a fund size of US$150M. The key areas are enterprise software, autonomous systems, AI, IoT, robotics & drones, next-gen semiconductors, sensors, and cloud infrastructure. For each industry sector we approach, our investment targets represent those start-ups with the greatest inchoate potential.
About Cheng Wu
Cheng is a successful serial entrepreneur and well-acclaimed industry veteran, having founded and led numerous businesses spanning various industries.
His entrepreneurship began in 1995. He founded Arris Networks, a start-up that developed high-density Internet access products that Cascade Communications acquired for US$217M in May 1996. In 1997 he founded ArrowPoint Communications, where he served as CEO, leading the company to a successful IPO, and was acquired by Cisco Systems for US$5.7 billion in 2000. Through this acquisition, he joined Cisco Systems and held various positions, including Group VP. In 2002, he founded Acopia Networks with US$65M and was acquired by F5 Networks for US$210M in 2007. In the same year, Wu founded Azuki Systems with US$6M specializing in broadband wireless multimedia data transfer software, which Ericsson subsequently acquired for US$100M in February 2014.
