Another report on our funding announcement. Thank you to the alarm:clock team.
Hedge Fund Tudor Makes Fifth Investment With AlertMe - A Zigbee Play The Latest
Zigbee sensor startup AlertMe has raised £5M from Tudor Investment Corp. It's a deal we missed and seems to have been announced in February.
AlertMe is a one-year old startup that's pitching a homeowner securtingy alerting system direct to the mobilephone. It has not released product yet but according to a report in Real Deals magazine, it will use the new low power Zigbee sensor technology as part of its home security alerting service. A typical application is a door sensor that triggers an alert to a homeowner's cellphone.
Library House says that this is Tudor's fifth transaction in recent months. The others are Plastic Logic (December 2006), Passado (December 2006), Netronome (November 2006) and Hotxt (July 2006), it said.
A couple of readers have written in to ask us for more info about Tudor and how it goes about sourcing dealflow and its interest in Europe. We do not have an answer yet. We know that GP Bullhound brokered the Passado deal. Maybe other a:c euro readers in the UK have some insight, if so, send us an email.
Back to AlertMe. It's too early to evaluate the product on offer, because there isn't one to look at yet, but the founders sound good.
The tech-oriented co-founder is Pilgrim Beart. This is his third wireless venture. His bio describes a career in the UK, then six years working in Silicon Valley in the 1990's for the likes of Atari and Chromatic Research (now AMD). Returned to Cambridge in '99 and founded activeRF Ltd., an early implementer of wireless asset-location systems and antenova Ltd., a VC-backed WiFi and Bluetooth antenna maker.
The other founder is Adrian Critchlow, whose most recent venture is an eco-hotel, a carbon-neutral hostelry for the wealthy tourist. But he's got some tech cred: founding ActiveHotels.com and Iota Software Ltd. and he was in marketing at Acorn Computer Group, at the time of the ARM spin out. ActiveHotels.com was acquired for £90 million giving its backers a "16 fold return".
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