A year ago I met with two scientists who blew my mind. Having spent most of my career in the telecoms industry I had seen a lot of tech breakthroughs in this field, but with this pair of founders, I felt like I found a diamond in the rough.

Backed by hundreds of patents, they spoke about re-inventing light and connectivity through an innovative solution that will make smart cities a reality.

They had a deep technology that was light years ahead of the competition, a vast understanding in RF waves and most importantly a child-like excitement about how cities could look in the future.

I felt that they had a vast well of potential, just waiting to be unleashed.

And I wasn’t alone in spotting this enormous potential. Semiconductor giant Qualcomm has enabled the company to use their latest chipsets for 5G. And the latest funding round, which we participated in, was joined by Amdocs and led by Comcast Ventures – both multinational telecom giants.

So what was so special about Juganu’s vision?

The global trend of cities going “smart” has been proceeding steadily, but slower than many of us expected. This is because the various tech solutions being offered – from parking sensors to integrated camera networks – have been installed on an ad-hoc basis, and at a tremendous upfront to municipalities.

Juganu is providing all the infrastructure a city needs to get smart, upon which it can implement any smart solution it wants. It does this by installing proprietary street lights with full wireless broadband capabilities and cameras. The lights have re-imagined the limits of LED technology and most importantly are the infrastructure upon which the smart solutions can be built.

The platform is an all-in-one solution for cities to manage facial recognition, license plate recognition, parking management, suspect tracking, and hazard & distress detection.

Those ingenious founders I mentioned earlier – Eran Ben-Shmuel and Alex Bilchinsky – are a couple of serial entrepreneurs who have a significant exit under their belt, strong electrical engineering backgrounds and hundreds of patents registered in their names.

In his own words, CEO & Founder Eran Ben-Shmuel described how Juganu is changing the way cities are going smart:

“The way we were doing it before made no sense. Imagine constructing a house. You don’t plan to have a specific cable for your television and a separate one for your fridge and another one for your blender. You line one electric cable to the house, and then the residents can choose what to connect to it. That’s what Juganu is doing – we’re allowing the residents, or in this case the cities, shopping malls or public spaces to connect whatever solutions they want on top of our platform.”

Technology that “Lights, Sees, Connects, and Thinks”

 

The platform Juganu has created have 4 main advantages over current market solutions:

1. Interoperable – As I mentioned before, Juganu’s solution allows easy integration of third-party applications, hardware devices and communication protocols. Once Juganu’s infrastructure is in place, it will allow for exponential development in the Smart Cities industry, as tech companies will build applications that can be implemented on the municipal level utilizing Juganu’s technology.

2. Lighting – Most of us don’t really stop to think about the quality of a light. But Juganu’s light is special. It mimics the sun and provides a simply unprecedented quality that makes plants grow better. The full spectrum patented planar light by Juganu has reimagined the limits of LED lighting.

3. Connectivity – Juganu’s infrastructure is connected wirelessly through the “FOAM” – with a gateway on just a single fixture, they create a backhaul to share data and video images for instantaneous use, harnessing powerful AI technology that can recognize events in real time. Data is analyzed locally using edge analytics instead of being sent to a centralized location, allowing the system to function without waste and at high speed.

Coupled with a partnership with Qualcomm (the global mover of 5G), Juganu is using its chipsets to ensure fast connectivity, paving the way for cities to implement 5G without the need for huge investments and expenditures.

4. Cost Savings – Juganu’s technology has not only undercut the market in terms of quality, but also in terms of price. Cities that have implemented Juganu’s solutions, including Mexico City and Jerusalem, have saved up to 90% in electricity consumption rates – real savings that can be passed onto residents. This is in part due to the municipalities’ ability to centrally control each individual light in the network, for better management, maintenance and with dimming capabilities.

The future of Smart Cities

Cities have been getting smarter over the years, slowly but surely. We believe Juganu’s infrastructure is going to rapidly accelerate progress in this industry.

The future looks bright for this light-creating, connectivity-generating company, and for cities around the world. The future looks smart.