Australian wi-fi chipmaker Morse Micro secures $17m

Right Click Capital, Atlas Advisors, and Skip Capital, a firm created by Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, also participated. Other backers include Uniseed, a fund launched by a group of local universities and the government's research unit CSIRO; Main Sequence Ventures, which manages the CSIRO Innovation Fund; and Clean Energy Innovation Fund, another government-backed vehicle.

Founded in 2016, Micro Morse develops low-power and long-range wi-fi chips for the IoT market that are said to be five times smaller and cheaper than existing products. The chips are touted as having a 10-times longer wireless connectivity range than conventional wi-fi chips while consuming 200 times less power. Target segments include smart homes, logistics, industrial facilities, retail, surveillance, smart cities, and agricultural and environmental monitoring.

"We design chips and there is a lot of development work but now we need to turn the company around and manufacture them in high volumes with high reliability," Morse Micro co-founder Michael De Nil said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. "[The investors] are a good balance between people who have built massive companies themselves helping us out, and venture firms that lend a different perspective to the business."

CSIRO, or the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization, is the inventor of wi-fi technology. Its key innovation was a local-area network that allowed radio wave systems to be used indoors and accelerated development of the home automation segment. The agency holds a US patent for wi-fi networking which has been subject to extended episodes of intellectual property litigation with groups including telecom giants Verizon and AT&T.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Australia
• Blackbird Ventures
• manufacturing