Jun 22, 2005This article was originally published by RFID Update.
June 22, 2005—RFID hardware and software provider RF Code of Mesa, Arizona, yesterday announced $20 million in venture capital funding from Baltimore's QuestMark Partners and Intel Capital of Santa Clara, California. It is the first institutional investment in the eight-year old company's history. Thomas Hitchner, a QuestMark Partner, and Michael Leidesdorff, a QuestMark Principal, will join the RF Code board of directors. The press release says the money will be spent on product, sales, and support organization development (read: growing the company).
RF Code has positioned itself according to what it calls a "hybrid RFID" approach, in which a combination of passive RFID, active RFID, and sensor technologies are used to build solutions. Its flagship product, TAViS, is middleware that accepts, processes, and redistributes data from a variety of auto-ID devices. TAViS has been in commercial use for three years and across a wide range of industries. The company also offers a line of active RFID tags and readers as well as a network appliance that processes RFID-generated data at the enterprise edge. According to QuestMark's Hitchner, his firm was attracted to RF Code for its "intellectual property, software development expertise, and market experience."
This investment is interesting for two reasons. First, all venture capitalist activity in RFID is notable since there has been a glaring absence of VC investment in the industry. For such a "hot", "emerging", and "transformative" technology as RFID, it has puzzled many that there hasn't been more VC participation. (Some have pointed to this fact as evidence that RFID is being over-hyped and the money-making opportunities exaggerated.)
Second, the choice of company lends ever-increasing credibility to the theory that RFID's future is inextricably intertwined with that of sensors. Many of the largest companies involved in RFID -- Sun and IBM in particular -- have stated that they see an RFID tag as "just another kind of sensor" that feeds data from the enterprise edge, and they have developed their solutions accordingly. RF Code is a company that has aggressively pursued a similar vision, which was yesterday validated with a $20 million investment.
Read the press release from RF Code
