Year 2018 has started with a bang and we are now gearing towards accelerated growth with the Haltian team. We see strong traction for our IoT Devices Platform Thingsee and on the other hand we have gotten many new high potential customers interested in our end-to-end product development services.
We made significant investments to our future in 2017. We continued the development of our technology platforms and products, as well as built the enablers for effective market presence moving forward. During the past 12 months we got some remarkable new customer references, started sales with our new IoT offering and took in a sizable investment to support our growth initiatives.
Not all sunshine, though. Making hardware is hard for so many reasons.
On the downside for 2017 one of our bigger customers unexpectedly shut down a large 360 imaging device R&D project which did hurt our profitability towards the year end.
Top 10 public Haltian achievements in IoT, Design and Engineering for 2017
1. First large scale commercial delivery for Thingsee IoT Devices platform
Good startups ship products. Since 2013 we have developed our Thingsee IoT offering and at all times learned from our customers. During the past years we have been highly focused to create our path to Internet of Things mass market with a highly competitive product offering. After more than four years in the game we are finally beginning to have very strong evidence we are actually getting there.
With the help of Thingsee One experience we were able to create a renewed recipe for better IoT offering and now we have taken our IoT Devices Platform to mass manufacturing – shipping thousands of devices to date. Our customers really embrace our end-to-end offering due to its simplicity and cost efficiency.
2. First NB-IoT data sent from a Thingsee device to Telia and DNA NB-IoT networks
We continue to invest in new technologies to stay on the front line of IoT tech development . In 2017 our Thingsee prototype devices were able to send NB-IoT data to both Telia and DNA networks and other operator tests are about to take place as we speak. Our NB-IoT devices are being tested by half a dozen of large corporations.
Although the mass market adoption for LTE-M and NB-IoT is still a few years ahead in most markets, our intention is to be ready for the rollout.
3. A sizable funding round to support Thingsee IoT Devices Platform
In the end of 2017 we closed a large funding round to support Thingsee go-to-market. Nordic Option Oy and some of our earlier investors Like Scripo Oy Vencubator invested in Haltian to support our growth initiatives and business expansion.
Nordic option is a VC from northern Finland which was one of the major reason to choose to move forward with them. Read more on the closing from our press release
4. Customer reference in wearables design and engineering: Oura Smart Ring public launch
Our customer Oura launched their latest and greatest in slush 2017. The new Oura ring is a prime example of Design and Engineering Expertise. It is one of the smallest wearable devices to date – yet offering top of the line performance and user experience.
We collaborated very closely on Oura´s design – making sure they had top experts contributing in every position.
5. Customer Reference in imaging devices engineering: Specim IQ Mobile Hyperspectral camera public launch and sales start
Specim launched their Mobile hyperspectral camera at the end of November 2017. With the help of our team Specim was able to miniaturize a “truckload of gear” to single mobile device, enabling very demanding image processing and computation wherever. Specim took spectral imaging data analysis from days to seconds in some cases.
Haltian helped Specim to create the device, the imaging device OS and the desktop application.
6. Thingsee IoT platform public launch at Slush 2017
We soft launched Thingsee IoT Devices Platform at Slush. Thingsee mission is to simply deliver quality data to IoT solutions around the world by creating and maintaining end-to-end IoT data layers
We presented the offering at Slush to tens, if not hundreds of people and got some very interesting feedback for the offering. After the event we were able to start new customer negotiations which will hopefully lead to new Powered by Thingsee solutions in 2018.
We will further optimize our messages and offering and some exciting news are expected in 2018.
7. New website and branding development for Haltian & Thingsee IoT Devices Platform
Our marketing and branding has been under continuous development since founding in 2012. In 2017 we finally felt we are able to take Haltian work to the spotlight and show the world some of the results we have achieved. Although a very big portion of our customer work remains a secret, hopefully you will get the picture simply by looking at what we have done for some of our customers.
In 2017 Thingsee went to a transition from a maker of developer devices to becoming an Industrial IoT sensors as a service provider. Lots of development still expected in 2018.
8. Successful pre-sales period for Thingsee Internet of Things Platform
We started the pre-sales of our new IoT Devices platform in 2017. The core mission for the sales initiative was to pinpoint the main needs of our enterprise Iot customers, as well as be able to direct our offering to match their IoT needs.
The results are nothing short of impressive. We currently have more than 70 active customer negotiations, more than 25 active pilots with customers and agreements in place for more than 20 000 devices. The total identified opportunity with our customers is now in the millions of IoT data points.
9. Haltian and Solita agreed on a partnership
In the IoT market it is utmost important to work well the other players to better serve the end customer. As Haltian is very good at IoT hardware and connectivity, joining forces with a IoT system integrator is almost a no-brainer.
In the partnership with Solita we provide devices and data layer services to their IoT projects and they provide their application and system development expertise to our demanding Industrial IoT customer solutions.
We expect to create many similar collaborations in 2018 with industry players globally.
10. First Snowfox B2B delivery to Caritas
Last but no least, Our Snowfox took a new B2B market step in 2017. The device itself has a multipurpose button, voice call, activity sensor and GPS-location enabled for building new solutions.
We made a special version of the device and built a complete IoT service for Caritas care. The device acts as a personal alarm / voice contact button for Caritas customers and the solution allows the care personnel to optimize work flows in the facility.
The solution has a Hardware-as-a-Service business model, meaning that Caritas gets a complete service with a monthly fee and Haltian maintains the service operations end-to-end.
What’s next? Our expectations for 2018:
First public customer launches for New Thingsee IoT Devices platform
We are just about to launch our first customer IoT solutions in the coming weeks. It is very exciting to see how the public will look at our offering after the first large scale IoT solutions go public.
Profitable Thingsee IoT Business
This year we estimate to ship a few large scale IoT solutions globally and make Thingsee one of the first profitable IoT offerings in the World.
Strong Events participation Globally
In 2018 we´ll participate more events than ever. we are also building our first own event around IoT – more news to follow in the coming months.
New customer launches in many most interesting markets
Our Design and Engineering services continue to serve amazing clients globally and we expect some pretty amazing collaborations to launch in 2018. Imaging, VR, Communications Devices, 5G, Health tech, Smart home and various sports instruments would be good examples of our work.
More connected than ever
Wirepas Connectivity, Bluetooth 4 and 5 and Bluetooth mesh for local connectivity are on the menu for 2018. On the cellular connectivity we will work with 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. Cellular IoT will enjoy also LTE-M and NB-IoT projects so we are pretty well covered. If some Sigfox and other LPWAN projects get started, one could state Haltian is pretty well connected company.