Beacon Transmitter Service Ifinity Valued At $12M After Seed Round

Apple’s iBeacon tech is still in its early stages, but we’re starting to see more people show interest in the idea of connecting their smartphones with real-world places and items.

Ifinity, a Warsaw-based company, uses a similar type of beacon service but wants to raise its scalability so that a whole city can make use of it.

Ifinity‘s beacons are small transmitters placed around buildings, trains and items and allow for complex implementations based on microlocation. The beacons cannot track users.

If you’re in a public setting like a museum or a mall, the beacon detects your phone and from there you can access a variety of services such as indoor navigation, remote control integration and context and location awareness and more. The beacons that transmit their own unique identification number to the local area and software on a receiving device can perform one of these functions.

The beacon’s purpose is to create smarter cities where people can use them to interact with their surroundings.

The company signed an investment deal with SpeedUp Venture Capital Group, which will carry out a seed capital investment. After the final payment, Ifinity will be valued at $12 million. Ifinity plans to invest the funds into research and development for implementing beacons into businesses to create smart cities. Ifinity received more than $1 million in its initial phase of funding.

One of Ifinity’s biggest clients is the city of Warsaw, where beacons are being implemented in the city office, public transport, museums and galleries. The city also commissioned a pilot implementation for microlocation and navigation systems in the Center for the Disabled.

Ifinity, co-founded by Adam Jesionkiewicz and Michal Polak, provides the ability to integrate existing IT systems with its beacons, allowing for POS micropayments, real-time equipment registry, parking space management and advanced data analytics.

While implementing these beacons and creating awareness will take a lot of time and money, it certainly has many helpful use cases, particularly in helping with the disabled. Check out the video to see how it works.