Emerson (EMR) has made a strategic investment through Emerson Ventures, its corporate venture capital arm, in Spearix Technologies, Inc., whose adaptive, multi-core radio processor provides a system-level solution for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) wireless communication. Through the investment and Emerson Ventures’ value-add strategic investment approach, Emerson will support Spearix’s technology and early stage growth while expanding upon its own IIoT capabilities. Emerson Ventures is the first corporate or institutional investor to make an investment in Spearix. In conjunction with the investment, Emerson has also entered into an engineering collaboration agreement with Spearix.
Based in Cedar Park, Texas, Spearix’s primary product offering is a multi-core radio processor and associated software that adapts to optimize performance and power based on measured environmental conditions. The technology has been shown to greatly improve the connection reliability of industrial protocols while operating under heavy interference induced by high-power, high-bandwidth pervasive Wi-Fi operation.
The investment will complement Emerson’s vision for WirelessHART and the evolution of its IIoT product portfolio. Emerson led the development of WirelessHART as an open standard in the 2000s, establishing it as the leading wireless protocol for industrial applications. Integration of Spearix technology offers a step-change in reliability and range that is fully compatibility with existing WirelessHART systems and will improve co-existence and spectral efficiency, provide larger network support to reduce total cost of ownership, offer higher data rates to accommodate data-rich devices, and provide redundancy for critical applications.
