CIMCON Lighting, a leading global provider of smart cities technologies, announced the closing of a $33 million financing led by Digital Alpha, which includes $23 million in Series C funding and a $10 million revenue-sharing facility. Energy Impact Partners (EIP), who led the Series B also participated in the round. These funds will enable CIMCON to extend its technology lead in the smart city space and expand its sales and marketing efforts to meet the incredible demand in the market.
The $10 million revenue-sharing facility is an innovative structure provided by Digital Alpha, which will empower CIMCON and its city customers to deploy smart city initiatives with minimal upfront investment.
“We are very pleased to share the news of this recent round of funding from two valued partners,” said Anil Agrawal, CEO of CIMCON. “We have proven through our technology, our customers, and our results that the world is ready to embrace smart city technology as a critical component to urban planning and design. These funds will allow us to develop new applications and services and deepen our partnership with Cisco – and make it easier for cities to move their visions from the drawing board to the city streets.”
CIMCON Lighting’s Smart City Platform is called NearSky. It simplifies the deployment of sensors, cameras, and other devices, such as Wi-Fi access points, so cities can more easily build a digital, data-driven city. It turns any city’s existing streetlight infrastructure into a flexible, reliable, and secure digital canopy that spans the city and serves as an Internet of Municipal Things.
One of the things NearSky can is enable cities to provide mobile apps, public Wi-Fi, wayfinding, information, and EV charging stations to citizens. To me, these sound like useful things that many people would want to have in their city.
NearSky also provides cities with data storage capabilities, analysis tools, and APIs that allow the cities to process the data that is collected across the city’s network of sensors. This could be good, or bad, depending on how the people in charge of the city use that data. Some people may interpret a city’s Internet of Municipal Things as enabling surveillance of innocent people.