The award-winning RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology provider PervasID has secured £1.6 million in Series A funding, as well as £240,000 awarded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, has backed the technology, along with Parkwalk, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Martlet, the investment arm of the Marshall of Cambridge Group. The additional funds will be used by PervasID to grow its delivery team, expand its reach into the healthcare, retail and industrial sectors, and provide essential innovation for its products.

“We are very pleased to have successfully closed this funding round which will help us innovate and develop our product further. The investment we have received from local investors is a particularly proud moment for us as they are backing technology that has been pioneered at the University of Cambridge. This highlights the importance of supporting research and development at these institutions. Along with the Innovate UK grant, this funding will help us expand our team and therefore our expertise, which will allow us to continue to innovate our product offering in the future,” said Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, co-founder and CEO.

Founded in 20111 by Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, Dr Michael Crisp, Professor Ian White and Professor Richard Penty, PervasID has developed a passive RFID technology that enables highly reliable reading of standard passive RFID tags.

Since receiving its first round of funding in 2016, PervasID has expanded its product offering and now has over 30 corporate customers who use the patented technology, which achieves almost 100 % detection. The technology provides location information in a wide area read zone and can scale up to service larger areas, such as shops and warehouses, in order to provide better stock visibility. It can also integrate with existing alarm systems to alert of theft, making it, in the words of one of PervasID’s major tier-one retail customers, “arguably the best and the only solution up to the challenge facing modern retailing.”