Airbus leads major €8m investment in energy harvesting chip designer
Energy harvesting chip designer e-peas Semiconductor in Belgium has raised €8m from Airbus Ventures and Partech, bringing the total investment to $13.2m.
The backing will be used accelerate the introduction of new products and open more offices around the world as it has order pipeline of over $500m. It currently has offices in Switzerland and the US.
Geoffrey Gosset, CEO of e-peas, explained his plans to eeNews Power last year when the company raised $4m: E-PEAS LOOKS TO RAISE FUNDS FOR ULTRA LOW POWER IoT MICROCONTROLLER AND SENSORS
This funding round was led by existing investors Airbus Ventures and French venture capital fund Partech, with KBC Focus Fund, W.IN.G, Noshaq Ventures, LeanSquare, Nivelinvest and Vives also contributing and brings the total investment to $13.2m.
The company sees tens of billions of connected IoT and edge computing devices starting to be deployed and activity will keep on ramping up in the decades ahead. Reliance on disposable batteries in this context is simply impractical, with heavy network maintenance costs being incurred (as depleted batteries will need replacing periodically), along with huge damage to the environment.
e-peas sees itself as a ‘one stop shop’ for a designer’s energy harvesting requirements so that hardware can be powered indefinitely. The company is targeting industrial, home/building automation, agriculture, health monitoring, smart metering and other sectors with its Ambient Energy Manager (AEM) product line. This now covers solar, thermal, vibration and RF methods for extracting energy from IoT devices’ surroundings – thereby making them completely energy autonomous.
“With its exceptional low-power ICs, e-peas is a key attractive partner for all those considering the design and deployment of energy-efficient autonomous devices at scale. e-peas has been a model in terms of execution and reliability. We are thrilled to continue supporting this outstanding European team through its fast-accelerating journey,” said Matthieu Repellin, Investment Manager at Airbus Ventures.
Next: $500m energy harvesting product pipeline
“Since our initial investment in 2017, we have been incredibly impressed by how Geoffroy and Julien have transformed a small R&D company into a recognized leader in low power IoT and edge computing with prestigious clients around the world. Geoffroy and Julien have also put the company in scale-up mode with the arrival of very experienced talents like Jean-Paul Bardyn and Christian Ferrier, have quadrupled the size of the team, and have developed an active commercial pipeline worth $500m over three continents. We are proud to be supporting e-peas again on their journey to make the world run battery-free,” said Romain Lavault, General Partner at Partech.
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- PMIC IS CAPABLE OF 100MV COLD START FROM HARVESTED ENERGY
- PMIC ELIMINATES BATTERY REPLACEMENT IN IoT SENSOR BOARD
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