Miovision, the Kitchener-based scale-up specializing in IoT-based traffic technologies, announced Tuesday it has successfully raised CDN$120 million, a substantial investment that will help it expand internationally, accelerate growth of its smart-traffic platform and hire more people.
“This funding round will help Miovision realize its goal of becoming the platform by which cities everywhere measure, manage and optimize traffic,” said Miovision co-founder and CEO Kurtis McBride.
The round was led by the venture arm of Telus Corp., supported by a syndicate led by McRock Capital, which invests in industrial IoT companies.
Telus will now hold two positions on Miovision’s board and will become the company’s wireless provider worldwide.
“TELUS is taking bold steps to improve the lives of Canadians by investing in Smart City technology that will connect and empower municipalities to build stronger, safer communities,” said Rich Osborn, Managing Partner, TELUS Ventures.
Miovision, which launched in 2005, has gained substantial traction in recent months helping cities upgrade their traffic management platforms and equip them to leverage the coming connectivity nexus of 5G bandwidth, artificial intelligence, data collection and IoT.
“We can generate data, and ultimately analytics and insights, to allow cities to make more agile, real-time decisions,” McBride told the Globe and Mail.
Miovision raised CDN$30 million in 2015 and a further CDN$15 million in May of 2018, at which time it had 150 employees. The company said Tuesday it is aiming to hire a further 100 people in the current calendar year, increasing its Canadian workforce by 50 per cent.
Miovision is the anchor tenant at Catalyst137, a sprawling, IoT-themed hub that McBride helped spearhead, and has an office in Cologne, Germany.
The cities of Toronto and Detroit are among those employing the company’s technology.
“If I look out into the five- to 10-year horizon, we see a huge opportunity for us to go out and build that smart-city architecture layer” upon which cities of the future will function, as autonomous vehicles and other trends reshape urban mobility, McBride told Communitech in 2018. “My instinct is that there is a race; if it’s not on already, there’s certainly the horses lining up in the gates.”
