It has been approximately 11 months since Blecon launched – a startup that made its official debut at Hardware Pioneers in 2024. At the event this year CEO Simon Ford spoke to IoT Insider about the company’s milestones, mapping a journey that began with introducing its tech – Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks, hotspots, and more recently Cloud-connected modules – to today, where customers are coming across them thanks to the requirements of different use cases that benefit from the power of BLE.
During our interview in 2024, Ford discussed how the company’s technology being based on Bluetooth, recognisable to both customers and consumers, granted it a considerable advantage. His experience working at Arm provided him with a front-row seat of the kinds of issues companies wanting to adopt Bluetooth for IoT connectivity experienced.
“Some of the use cases were more obvious to us, lots of things around smart asset tracking, evolution of beacons and things like that. Quite an obvious path … But people [are] doing all sorts of obscure things that I didn’t even imagine to be a problem,” Ford said today.
One example provided was a customer case study where they worked with a company that manufactured fluid monitoring devices powered by Wi-Fi, but were experiencing challenges associated with Wi-Fi.
“They’re on their second-generation [device], so they know the industry,” said Ford. “The sort of problems they were having was not about the application. It was about deployment and getting customers. That was limiting their ability to scale the product.”
More specifically, its customers that were using the fluid monitoring devices were having difficulties with the Wi-Fi provisioning process, and some experienced issues with the restrictive nature of Wi-Fi when it came to third party access.
As a result, the customer moved from using Wi-Fi powered devices to Blecon powered, which has simplified deployment.
“A really interesting example where although people understand our applicability to standard Bluetooth and beacons … [in] this one we’re replacing what seems logical; a Wi-Fi solution,” noted Ford.
A shifting business model
Another key observation that has come out from operating the business in the last 11 months has been how the industry has been predicated on the capital-intensive cost of deploying solutions, with less money allocated to maintaining customer experience.
“A lot of projects were quite capital intensive. So it was about paying someone to come and deploy a solution and set it up, and … the industry has built around that sort of model … the assumption that they have to pay a lot of money up front … then the cost of running it has to be super cheap because it’s a capital-based product,” explained Ford.
Customers that are oriented around deploying services are sometimes prohibited by the cost of deploying, and in some cases, it can be a barrier to entry.
“What we found is we’re an amazing fit for that, because a lot of what we can do can reduce the cost of deployment, whether that’s the cost of hardware or … the cost of deploying it. Maybe the customer can deploy it themselves, because it can be quite deskilled.”
One way in which Bluetooth is cheaper is thanks to widespread adoption. By Blecon allowing customers to re-allocate their budget to maintaining services and ensuring customer experience is top-notch, their customers are significantly advantaged.
“I was expecting people to say, ‘oh, it’s cheap. This is why we can do it. It’s cheaper than cellular’. I wasn’t expecting customers to say, oh it’s free,” said Ford, in relation to how customers view the cost of deploying Bluetooth. “This year we’ll start to see how we can exploit that further, because I think we’re starting to learn some of the use cases that people care about, that fall into that category.”
Launch of Cloud-connected modules
Last month Blecon launched its Cloud-connected modules which provide Cloud connectivity over BLE, offering secure identity, geolocation, global time synchronisation and over-the-air updates. The aim being, to allow developers to connect their products to the Cloud even faster and reduce time-to-market.
“There are a lot of companies where it’s their first time adding a radio to their product,” said Ford of the decision behind launching these modules. “There are a lot of products that you wouldn’t consider to be connected. What we realised is [there] are a lot of companies who wanted to add some sort of connectivity channel, [without] impacting the product much.”
Subsequently, developers are given an accessible way of designing a radio-based product. Blecon also worked with Nordic Semiconductor on the project. The modules were built on Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF54L series, a system-on-chip (SoC). This means Nordic Semiconductor customers who are accustomed to using their chips are comfortable working with them.
Their relationship with Nordic came out of Ford trusting the company and their products, appreciating how they operate and the advantage of existing familiarity with their chips.
Another key point to make working with the Cloud-connected modules seamless included Blecon’s software being built and integrated with Zephyr open-source RTOS.
“It’s a lot of functionality out of the box, not just software, but the whole solution,” explained Ford.
Next steps
The company is 11-months old and in a short space of time, completed a $4.6m funding round, released support for Nordic’s nRF54L series, and launched a new IoT connectivity solution – to name a few milestones.
What’s next?
“We’ve been working with a couple of Bluetooth device manufacturers to bring Blecon into their devices so that customers can pick them up … and exploit the economies of scale you get not just with the Bluetooth chip inside but with these generic devices. The customers look quite different, but they can move fast, and that’s exciting for us as a company.”
It’s certainly been quite the journey, and Ford commented that it was one thing knowing the validity of Bluetooth, and another thing exploiting it.
“You know it to be true, but it takes a lot of patience and persistence to make these things pay out,” he concluded.
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