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LOS ANGELES —ThingMagic, the privately held RFID reader supplier, has secured an additional $9.5 million in venture capital funding from current investors. The Cambridge, Mass. company says it plans to use the investment to expand globally and build on its product portfolio.
Funds announced Monday come from existing investors: Tudor Ventures, The Exxel Group, Morningside Technology Ventures and 406 Ventures.
Tom Grant, ThingMagic's chairman and CEO, says the company has raised just under $25 million since 2005. "We aren't profitable, but we are getting very close," he says. "We expect to reach profitability in 2009."
That profitability could come from a variety of consumer-facing applications the company is working on with third-party companies like toolmaker DeWalt. The two companies designed and built Tool Link, an asset-tracking RFID application offered as an option on Ford Motor Co.'s 2009 F-Series pickup trucks and E-Series vans.
Introduced in February at the Chicago Auto Show, Tool Link relies on an EPC Gen 2 RFID reader in the truck bed, along with software on an in-dash computer system that runs Microsoft Windows CE to track tools. Another example, MediaCart, the RFID-enable grocery store shopping cart that serves-up ads in real-time to a display mounted on the basket.
"It's one area where there is great opportunity and significant upside because we are able to integrate the technology in a more seamless way," Grant says. "Also, the small size of the M5e and the M5e-C readers get people thinking outside the box. Advertising is certainly one way."
The embedded Mercury M5e and M5e-Compact readers, first introduced in March, combine multi-region capability into one module to make it easier to deploy in Europe, China, Japan, North America, South America, and South Korea. Both readers rely on the RFID Transceiver R1000 chip designed by Intel and recently acquired by Impinj.
Grant says other RFID consumer-facing apps are being implemented at ski resorts and promotional self-contained displays, such as a smart shelf, in retail stores. The application allows consumer product goods (CPG) companies to check on sales of specific products in the store without counting the number of items on a shelf.
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