NTT DOCOMO Ventures Invests in Shoof Technologies, Inc.

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; President & CEO, Takayuki Inagawa), has invested in Shoof Technologies, Inc. (headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, US; CEO, Ra’ed Elmurib), a US-based start-up company. Shoof Technologies is a pioneer of an advanced wireless technology designed for the Industrial IoT.

In today’s logistics market, one of the biggest problems for Industrial IoT is building a cost-efficient solution for managing and monitoring an exponentially growing amount of indoor assets. In many scenarios, increased power for cellular or GPS activity is still insufficient to achieve connectivity within challenging indoor environments and quickly drains the limited battery capacity of the sensor, ultimately reducing the lifetime of an RFID tag for tracking assets.

Shoof’s technology for asset monitoring and tracking overcomes the unreliable nature of current wireless technology. It offers a cloud platform and equipment such as base stations and tags to track assets in motion in any location in real time. It is applicable to a wide range of industrial markets with unmatched advantages, including scalability, ability for both indoor and outdoor tracking, a long communication range, blockchain-capable security authentication, open-network infrastructure, and is free of maintenance.

Since successfully raising seed-round about a year ago, Shoof has been focusing on product development and product trials with several high-profile customers in the business of manufacturing automotive and industrial products, airports, and freight carriers.

With this investment, NTT DOCOMO Ventures predicts not only the success of Shoof’s expansion into the Japanese market, but also future collaboration with location tracking solutions with the NTT Group.