enModus

enModus is a 4-year-old smart buildings technology company founded by Andy Heaton (CEO) and Phil Young (CTO) and based in Chepstow, UK. Led by experienced entrepreneurs, who together blend their technology, commercial and leadership skills into a world beating team, the company develops and markets Wattwave, a unique powerline communications protocol designed to be the robust, efficient and secure communications backbone for smart buildings. Unlike competing wireless and wired technologies, Wattwave offers the long-range, robust, low cost and easy-to-embed communications needs of smart appliances, lighting and heating controls. As a powerline-based technology, Wattwave is far less susceptible to signal interference and propagation issues in homes, and it was designed from the ground up to offer unparalleled range. Wattwave is also ten times cheaper to embed than competing technologies such as ZigBee, making it a very attractive proposition for OEMs looking to develop connected Smart Home devices, in particular lower cost devices such as LED light bulbs or smartplugs. Four patents are pending on core principles of Wattwave, offering enModus strong IP protection. After raising £150,000 in Angel funding in 2010 and a first venture capital round of £1 million in 2011, enModus recently raised a further £1.5m of investment which will allow the company to cost-optimise Wattwave and take it to market. Our ultimate goal is for enModus to become the leading provider of powerline chipsets and software technology for smart appliances and smart building solutions – similar in business strategy and approach to Qualcomm CDMA Technologies in the wireless market. enModus is a graduate of the SETsquared start-up incubator, and is a member of Microsoft's BizSpark and ARM's Connected Community programmes.