LPWAN company Actility acquires IoT geolocation specialist

French LPWAN player Actility has forked out on Abeeway, a geolocation system specialist, to augment its ThingPark IoT platform.

The thinking behind this first acquisition since Actility secured a fresh round of funding last month is that this is a significant, strategic acquisition for the company. It’s easy to see how geolocation would add value to an IoT platform, especially in areas such as transport and logistics, supply chains and security.

“We’re seeing massive demand for location-aware IoT solutions from industry,” said Actility CEO Mike Mulica. “We’ve been rapidly developing our ThingPark Location platform to deliver powerful tools to service providers and our customers in the tracking ecosystem. As a long-time partner with Abeeway, we saw great potential in adding their patented assisted GPS (A-GPS) technology and expertise in tracking to the capabilities of our ThingPark platform.”

“Since the first LoRaWAN tracker was presented by Abeeway in 2015, Abeeway has continuously improved IoT tracking solutions, developing the first patented low power GPS (A-GPS for IOT) as well as data fusion to optimize localization & power consumption,” said Abeeway Founder Florian Sforza, who will join Actility.

At Mobile World Congress Actility CTO Oliveir Hersent told us about Actility’s move from being a LoRa specialist to become a more general IoT platform provider. This acquisition seems like another move in that direction.