To Be, a company specialized in the development of LiFi solutions, the transmission of data and information through LED light, exceeds in less than twenty days the maximum goal set of 900 thousand euros for the crowdfunding campaign on Mamacrowd. Institutional investors also believe in the innovative scope of this technology, capable of transmitting data through LED light, including Azimut Eltif – Venture Capital ALIcrowd III and Magic Spectrum, an accelerator dedicated to the connectivity of the National Network of Accelerators of CDP VC, Digital Magics and Fondazione Compagnia San Paolo. The funds raised will be invested mainly in actions aimed at the acquisition of new human capital with the main objective of strengthening the company structure in various areas. To Be is looking for talents to join the team with an international background, possibly with experience in terms of scale-ups in the ICT sector. In the technical area, the objectives will be to accelerate the development of the LiFi Zone platform, improving the services already present and generating revenues and developing new features to expand the range of services provided by the platform, with a strong focus on people with disabilities. In the marketing area, the goal is to commercially scale the solution on target markets by diversifying the offer on the various sales channels, direct and indirect. In fact, several resources will be invested in the creation of strategic and commercial partnerships with players in the TLC sector, system integrators as well as large design studios. In addition, the company will allocate part of the available resources to begin to enter international markets starting from some European countries where activities have already been launched. However, the true internationalization of the company and related commercial scaleup will be the subject of a future round, within the next 24 months. “We are thrilled to have exceeded the maximum goal of €900,000 in just three weeks from the launch of the campaign on Mamacrowd. This demonstrates the great interest in our technology and the willingness of investors to become protagonists of the LiFi Revolution by supporting the growth and development plan that will give greater structure to the company, consolidate our leadership position on the Italian market and allow us to start looking abroad with courage and ambition – declares Francesco Paolo Russo in a note, founder & CEO of To Be – . LiFi Zone is just the first piece of a larger plan that will open the doors to a new era in which light becomes a source of data and information. We offer a sustainable and socially useful solution in a variety of sectors, both in the public and corporate worlds.” To Be, founded in 2016 from the vision of Francesco Paolo Russo and Raniero Pani’s twenty years of experience in the lighting and home automation sector, boasts strategic and commercial partnerships and collaborations with companies in the sector such as Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), multinationals in the TLC sector and system integrators, as well as having obtained a pre-seed round of 75 thousand euros from Magic Spectrum, accelerator dedicated to the connectivity of the CDP VC National Network of Accelerators, managed by Digital Magics. To Be has also obtained non-repayable public funding for about 266 thousand euros, in fact, To Be’s development projects and LiFi solutions fully respond to the main technological and European funding trends and the PNRR that embrace ecological, digital and network infrastructure transition missions.
Where LiFi already works
With its more than 200 active LiFi points including museums, hospitals, schools and offices, To Be has developed the implementation of LiFi Zones in Pompeii, thus transforming it into the first archaeological site equipped with LiFi technology, and also in the Asl Napoli 2 Nord, with the first LiFi hospitals in Italy and Europe, or the Rosetta Rossi Comprehensive Institute in Rome, first LiFi school in Italy. LiFi Zone is built on a cloud infrastructure that scales quickly. It allows remote access at any time to manage and monitor all the functions associated with the LiFi light points in the different sites of interest. The architecture of the solution includes a software component, i.e. an app, which can also be integrated into third-party solutions, developed specifically to enable devices to receive the signal and the installation of a hardware component, i.e. LED lighting fixtures equipped with a special LiFi modulator thanks to which the same light that illuminates an environment conveys information directly to people’s smartphones. This technology, precisely because of its innovative data transmission characteristics, is used in the most diverse environments: museums, archaeological parks, schools, hospitals, retail, offices, places sensitive to radio waves and from the point of view of cybersecurity. It can work, in its various forms, both as an indoor navigation system in which the user, moving within an environment, receives timely information and can be guided along a path, and as a wireless connectivity system as if it were a wifi but via light. LiFi Zone, unlike traditional navigation tools that rely on Bluetooth or GPS that have margins of error in the order of meters, can make a mistake of a few centimeters at most. This feature has a great social impact, in fact, for indoor navigation, in addition to enabling different types of media content, thanks to the high precision of geolocation and through audio and video inputs in relation to the target user, it can help people with disabilities in the use of safe routes in environments. In addition, LiFi systems, requiring the replacement of old lamps with new state-of-the-art LEDs, allow greater energy efficiency and a reduction, especially in indoor environments, of electromagnetic pollution from radio frequencies.
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