Morse Micro, a designer of wifi chips for IoT applications, has won the support of Uniseed and the Csiro Innovation Fund in a round that brought its total to at least $20.8m.
Australia-based wifi chip maker Morse Micro yesterday obtained A$23.8m ($17m) of funding from a consortium backed by multi-university venture fund Uniseed.
Csiro Innovation Fund, the venture fund established by research institute Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, also participated alongside the Australian government-backed Clean Energy Innovation Fund.
Venture firms Blackbird Ventures and Right Click Capital, investment fund Skip Capital and individual investor Ray Stata filled out the round.
Founded in 2016, Morse Micro develops and manufactures wifi chips with greater transmission range and energy efficiency than standard models to help support internet-of-things (IoT) devices.
IoT devices allow household and industrial appliances such as light switches and machinery to link into the client’s network, however stable connectivity and longer-lasting battery-life are considered major prerequisites for their adoption.
Morse Micro’s chips are engineered to industry standard wifi HaLow, created for technologies such as IoT. The company’s technology can route more than 8,000 devices to a single access point, with data transfer rates of several megabits-per-second.
Morse Micro will put the funding towards growing its workforce from 24 people to 54, as it looks to achieve mass market penetration with its products.
Main Sequence Ventures, the VC firm established to manage Csiro Innovation Fund, joined Pan Group Australia to co-lead a round of undisclosed size for Morse Micro in October 2017 that featured undisclosed investors. Sydney Morning Herald gave the figure as about $3.5m, however this could not be otherwise confirmed.
Morse Micro also reportedly procured $325,000 through a 2016 seed round backed by unnamed investors, in connection with its participation in the Startmate accelerator earlier that year.
