Sammy Loitto, CEO of Quuppa, shares Quuppa’s origin, how it has evolved during the pandemic and what’s the future of Quuppa technology in the post-pandemic era.
Quuppa was established in September 2012, by the team responsible for the invention of the High Accuracy Indoor Positioning (HAIP) at the Nokia Research Center.
With over fifteen years of experience as its foundation, the Quuppa team commercialised their innovation to create a complete product platform – the Quuppa Intelligent Locating System™.
Our real-time location systems (RTLS) is used across a wide cross section of industries including Logistics, Healthcare, Security, Retail and Hospitality to Sports. Quuppa is using RTLS to help organisations improve overall business efficiency, optimize operations and enhance worker safety through asset tracking.
Today Quuppa is a leading provider of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS), with 2600+ deployments in 55+ countries and over 200 partners worldwide.
Quuppa is a privately owned, independent company, employing 50+ people and holds its headquarters in Espoo, Finland – with offices in Washington DC (USA), Sydney (AUS), Shanghai & Shenzhen (CN).
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
We believe that in the future, all devices will be connected not just by data, but by location. Currently, ’location’ for most people means the location provided by outdoor positioning systems. But because most devices and users actually spend most of their time indoors, there is a growing demand for services that utilise indoor positioning.
In outdoor positioning, the entire globe can be covered by just a few satellites. But when it comes to indoor positioning, each building is a world of its own. Because the indoor positioning environment is so complex, it cannot be dominated by any single major player.
Our technology is open to be used by everyone in this collaborative ecosystem. Much like GPS is to outdoor positioning, we see the Quuppa technology becoming a de facto standard indoors; either to be used alone or in combination with other technologies. There are many use cases and different customer needs, which demand for a variety of technology solutions.
Quuppa wants to serve as a key building block for the new Location-Enabled World. We aim to be a catalyst that accelerates the success of our partner companies through our technology and know-how.
How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
The pandemic has had both positive and negative effects on the business. Location, in general, became a hot topic and the pandemic accelerated demand for location tracking.
This generated new safety use cases for the Quuppa locating system; e.g. to secure business continuity and worker safety in offices, factories, hospitals via social distancing and contact tracing; if someone was tested positive to back track who the person has been in contact with.
The negative effects were as for many others that many industries put new IOT investments on hold. Also, in some cases people could not travel onsite, so the project got postponed. On the other hand, we are seeing more governmental initiatives for example in the healthcare and elderly care industry to secure investments in digitalisation in order to be better prepared for future pandemics.
What can we hope to see from Quuppa Technologies in the future?
In 2020 we raised €20 million of funding and our focus has been to use this for product development; ease of use of the system, lowering the infrastructure cost in the set up phase and offering the whole range of use cases from high accurate positioning to room/zone level accuracy.
Our vision is that in 10 years location will become ubiquitous.
Twenty years ago, WiFi was a rarity, phones weren’t smart, and data was costly.
Today you can get WiFi even on a plane; all devices from toothbrushes to tower cranes are online, and everyone understands the value in connectivity.
But what will the next 15 years bring? At Quuppa, we see a clear path from today’s Connected World toward a Location-Enabled World.
What we mean is that data without context is not relevant. Connectivity itself doesn’t make anything smart. Only by enriching data and connectivity with location will our world become truly smart.
We envision the value of location to be as clearly understood in 2030 as the value of connectivity is today. Meanwhile, we are seeing more and more businesses leveraging on Location-Based Services for driving their everyday operations.
Did you know?
Quuppa is the World’s Leading Location Technology Platform.
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