With $1M run rate, Nimble Wireless is making IoT monitoring of pets and frozen foods mainstream

Thursday July 13, 2017 , 5 min Read

Leveraging IoT, Nimble Wireless aims to help enterprises and individuals monitor their assets remotely. With features such as water resistance and 24-month battery life, Nimble believes its products can compete with established players and giants in this space.

A startup providing end-to-end IoT solutions for monitoring remote assets, Nimble Wireless, recently announced that it had crossed $1 million in revenues. Talking to YourStory, Siva Sivakumar, CEO, Nimble Wireless, says that the company’s entire solution (hardware, firmware, and cloud/mobile apps) including manufacturing is ‘Made in India’, ie in Bengaluru and Chennai.

Nimble Wireless has so far raised around $1 million in funding from Prime Venture Partners and other investors. The startup also claims to be on target to achieve over 100 percent growth by the end of the current fiscal year. Here is its story.

Story so far

Founded by Siva Sivakumar and Naveen Sabhapathy, Nimble Wireless connects industrial assets to cloud and gathers intelligence to monitor, control and manage them through wireless sensors. Siva said that he had earlier worked at Qualcomm as a senior staff engineer and had got a taste of building wireless products. He was also a part of the team that had created the world’s first touch-based smartphone at Qualcomm.

The experience with wireless products helped Siva and Naveen, when they started up Nimble (then under a different name) as a wireless services company, to generate revenue. After understanding the sector, they recently launched their own portfolio of products.

Siva stated that Nimble’s vertical-focused product portfolio in wireless hardware along with its cloud-based IRIS application helps it cater to multiple verticals such as transportation, logistics, cold chain management, green energy, and healthcare industries.

The company provides IOT SaaS (Solution as a Service) products to consumers and businesses and helps them keep their pets safe. It lets food companies keep food safe and fresh and assists pharma companies in keeping their medicines/vaccines and clinical samples potent. Nimble Wireless’ business model involves a one-time fee (approximately $20) for their hardware, post which companies pay a monthly subscription plan based on the scale of their monitoring requirements.

Pets safety and food safety monitoring

The IoT startup recently introduced an app-based pet safety product, mainly targeted at the recreational vehicle (RV) and pet owners in the US. Branded as RVPetSafety, the product is designed to monitor a pet’s environment temperature, on the go, through the app. Siva noted,

Pets are extremely sensitive to temperature changes and most of them cannot withstand temperatures higher than 102 F and lower than 32 F.

Siva added that pets dying of heatstroke or frostbite is a cause of major concern among pet owners in the US. The RVPetsSafety app is able to send real-time SMS and email alerts when the pet’s environment temperature exceeds set limits. Users can set the alert temperatures through their mobile app and monitor their pets as per the season and time. According to Siva, their product has sold 1,000 units so far since its launch late last year.

Talking about one of the main USPs, Siva said that because of their proprietary technology and hardware-software integration, their products can last up to 24 months on a single charge. He also said that their devices come equipped with up to 12 different sensors that can measure humidity, light, proximity, tilt, etc.

Nimble also works with food production and distribution companies in the US and Canada and enables them to monitor the safety of food in real time. Siva said,

The backbone of the cold chain industry depends on delivering the food cold and healthy, by keeping them at the right temperature at all times. Nearly 25 percent of the manufactured goods are wasted during storage due to improper storage of temperature-sensitive products.

For this use case, Nimble has a Food & Safety tracker to help the food industry stay compliant with the newly enacted food safety modernisation act (FSMA) enforced by the US federal and drug administration (FDA). Nimble’s restaurant temperature monitoring devices can also be used to monitor the temperature of cold rooms, cold warehouse, retail fridges, visible coolers. Nimble’s customers include key players in the US logistics and food industry such as Rehrig Pacific and Wismettac Asian Foods. Nimble also lists companies such as Ibaco, Milky Mist and Eatfresh on its website, as customers.

Sector overview and future plans

While headquartered in India, Nimble is bullish about the market opportunity in the USA, as over 65 percent households in the US own at least one pet. According to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), the market for pet products reached an estimated $62.75 billion in 2016 and is expected to grow at 5.4 percent annually.

In addition, the RV industry’s shipments are expected to reach 472,200 units in 2017, according to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA). In comparison, the pet care market in India is upcoming, but not at par with the US market.

While the pet care system is a niche sector, cold storage and monitoring of food and beverage is more mainstream. Players like Bosch and Sensaphone are some of the players that Nimble Wireless competes with.

From their current run rate of $1 million, Nimble Wireless aims to grow 10 times in the next three years and generate $10 million in revenues by 2019. They aim to expand to other sectors like elder care, where remote monitoring would be needed. Talking about their future plans, Siva said,

We look forward to growing this business to support over 150 million pet owners in the US. We are also upbeat about our how our product is being used in the food industry and the work we are doing with them to ensure compliance. We recently helped a leading food company in Los Angeles by equipping its trucks and cold rooms with real-time monitoring systems to ensure FSMA compliance.

Website: www.nimblewireless.com

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