'Awesome and crazy': Wi-Fi potential a hit with Morse Micro investors

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'Awesome and crazy': Wi-Fi potential a hit with Morse Micro investors

By Cara Waters

Morse Micro is on the verge of bringing its long-range Wi-Fi chip to market, securing an additional $US13 million ($17 million) in funding from heavyweight investors falling over themselves to back the technology.

The Sydney-based startup's 'HaLow' Wi-Fi chip, on track to launch next year, is low-power, long-range and specifically designed for Internet of Things (IoT) environments, where large number of sensors connected to the internet work together to deliver a service. The coronavirus pandemic has seen an increased interest in Wi-Fi technology, which powers wireless internet connections.

"Wireless connectivity has never been more important than right now, everyone's working from home, everyone's been buying new Wi-Fi equipment to get that reliable connectivity," Morse Micro co-founder Michael De Nil said. "The demand has definitely gone up for this type of technology."

Morse Micro co-founder and chief executive Michael De Nil with one of the HaLow Wi-Fi chips.

Morse Micro co-founder and chief executive Michael De Nil with one of the HaLow Wi-Fi chips.

The additional funding secured by Morse Micro comes from new and existing investors, including venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures, the CSIRO's venture arm Main Sequence Ventures, Scott Farquhar and Kim Jackson's investment vehicle Skip Capital, the Clean Energy Innovation Fund and American investor and entrepreneur Ray Stata.

It takes the total funds raised by Morse Micro to $US30 million and will help the startup expand its 70 product and technology development teams in Sydney and in its offices in India, China and the United States.

Blackbird partner Nick Crocker said the appetite for investing in Morse Micro was "the hungriest I've ever seen investors" who seemed to understand the huge potential for the startup.

"For Michael and Andy to have recruited one of the best chip teams globally and to be setting out on a mission to power, millions if not billions of devices around the world... with a chip that powers those devices to be built by an initial team of four people, and now 70 people in Australia is just both awesome and crazy," he said.

"It's about as big an ambition as you can get and it's about as big a technical challenge as you can climb."

Morse Micro was founded by Mr De Nil and Andrew Terry in 2016 and one of its early team members was the original inventor of Wi-Fi, Professor Neil Weste.

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Mr De Nil said Wi-Fi has very high speeds but limited range and testing by the Morse Micro team has seen the HaLow chip enable Wi-Fi from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the Sydney Opera House.

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"We really see Wi-Fi get to many, many more devices with this new technology that we're bringing out to bring it from billions of devices to tens of hundreds of billions of devices," he said.

Mr De Nil said the latest investment round brought the experience and funding that could turn Morse Micro into a technology unicorn.

"It really helps us moving forward from just a technology company that builds cool IP [intellectual property] and then tries to sell itself off to another big player to a company that can actually get to significant revenue and can turn itself into a multibillion-dollar company," he said.

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