Cape Town-based Wi-Fi start-up Asimmetric has raised a “seven-figure US dollar amount” in new funding from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Founded by experts in the telecommunications industry, Asimmetric develops tools to help Wi-Fi service providers monitor the performance of their hotspots remotely.
The latest investment round was led by Avidan Ross’s Root Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on hardware, logistics and manufacturing and engineering design, Asimmetric said in a statement. Ross will join the company’s board of directors.
Asimmetric’s new investors include Bolt and Haystack.
Bolt is a venture capital firm that invests exclusively in early-stage companies that operate at the intersection of hardware and software.
Bolt’s team has shipped tens of millions of units of over 100 different products and made investments in companies like Desktop Metal, Tempo Automation and Petnet, Asimmetric said.
Haystack, founded by Semil Shah, has invested in over 70 companies, including Instacart, Doordash and Giphy.
In addition, Asimmetric’s existing angel investors increased their investment in the company.
Asimmetric isn’t disclosing the exact value of the funding round.
The company was founded by David Wilson, Ross Douglas, Michael Champanis and Fouad Zreik, who spent several years designing and building both the hardware and the software to provide detailed remote reporting, including analytics, about Wi-Fi hotspots to operators.
News of the new funding comes just six months after Asimmetric became the first South African company to join the hardware accelerator programme Highway1, based in San Francisco.
Highway1 is an intensive, 16-week programme where hardware start-ups work directly with a team of engineers and other professionals to improve their hardware, operations and sales.
Asimmetric intends using the newly raised capital to launch the next generation of its products, expand its engineering team in Cape Town and grow its commercial office in San Francisco.
“We’ve come a long way, but this is still the beginning of our journey,” said Wilson in a statement.
“One year ago, my co-founders and I were hand-assembling our devices in a basement in Cape Town. Now we have teams in South Africa and San Francisco, our devices are being used on three continents, and we are backed by some of the best hardware and Internet of things investors in the world.” — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media
