Calumino Announces Series A Funding Round to Scale First-of-its-Kind Intelligent Thermal Sensing Platform

Celesta Capital and Taronga Ventures lead the $10.3M Series A Round

SYDNEY, Sept. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Calumino, the developer and manufacturer of a proprietary next-generation thermal sensor technology and AI, today announced its $10.3M USD Series A funding. The funding round is led by Celesta Capital and Taronga Ventures, with additional participation from Egis Technology and others. Calumino's innovation offers the first-ever intelligent sensing platform, which is an aggregator of new and valuable data points on human presence, activity, hazards, and the environment.

As the world's first thermal sensor to combine AI with high performance image sensing, privacy protection, and affordability, Calumino's platform enables new benefits for a broad range of applications. This includes smart building management, pest control, safety and security, healthcare, and more. The Calumino thermal sensor has been natively designed with a sufficiently low resolution to protect an individual's privacy, which in turn fills the current market gap between intrusive IP cameras and low performance motion sensors.

Sensing temperatures rather than light, the Calumino thermal sensor maps environments, assets, and individuals and has the ability to detect human presence, activity, and posture. It can also differentiate humans from animals and detect hazardous hotspots, fires, water leaks, and other anomalies. This unique data is essential for saving energy, increasing business operation efficiencies, increasing security and safety, improving life quality, and saving lives.

The Series A funding follows the successful commercialization of Calumino's technology in the areas of commercial building management and pest control. Most recently, the company has entered the Japanese market with a Mitsubishi Electric subsidiary as a strategic partner, launching its innovative pest control product "Pescle" based upon the Calumino thermal sensor + AI.

"We are incredibly excited about this partnership and plan to roll this product out globally with our partners," said Marek Steffanson, Founder and CEO of Calumino. "No other technology can differentiate between humans and rodents reliably, in darkness, affordably, intelligently, and with very low data bandwidth – but this application is just the beginning. Our technology is creating an entirely new space in the market and we are incredibly grateful to our investors for their support as we continue to scale production and enable the next generation of intelligent sensing to solve important problems."

With its Series A proceeds, Calumino plans to expand existing applications and create new use cases. The team also plans to further invest in research and development, as well as expand its global team including new offices in Europe, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States.

"Calumino's unique technology is helping to drive the proliferation of IoT – the intelligence of things – and enabling for the first time intelligent thermal imaging that is cost-effective, privacy-protecting, and scalable to mass markets," said Nicholas Brathwaite, Founding Managing Partner of Celesta Capital. "Celesta is excited to offer our financial and intellectual capital support to help Calumino pursue their bold ambitions in becoming the ultimate IoT technology."

"Calumino's affordable and intelligent technology is changing the standard of how we live, work and play in real assets. The unique data and insights that Calumino is able to provide will enable asset owners to create safe, secure, and healthy environments using market-leading technology", said Sven Sylvester, Investment Director at Taronga Ventures. 

Calumino is an emerging deep-tech company, developer and manufacturer of proprietary and mass-deployable thermal sensors and AI technology. Calumino has pioneered the world's first privacy-protecting AI thermal sensor platform, filling the gap between intrusive cameras and low-performance motion sensors to protect individual privacy while delivering operational insights to a wide variety of applications. Founded in 2014, Calumino is headquartered in Australia with clients, partners and teams across the globe and has raised over $20M USD to date. Learn more at http://calumino.com 

Celesta Capital is a leading deep technology venture capital firm that leverages synergies between leading centers of innovation in the US, India, and Israel to create globally impactful enterprises. The Celesta team, with deep operating experience, has built multi-billion-dollar businesses at companies such as Intel, Cisco, Apple, and Flex. The firm has funded over 80 technology companies globally and actively invests in the following verticals: software, semiconductors, intelligent systems, bioconvergence, and industry transformers. Learn more at http://celesta.vc.

About Taronga Ventures

Taronga Ventures is Asia's leading technology and innovation investor focused on the real asset sector. The group consists of funds, RealTechX innovation programs and Taronga Advisory with offices in Singapore and Australia. Taronga Ventures's funds are backed by global institutional investors and major real estate owners including APG, Ivanhoé Cambridge, CBRE Inc., PGIM Real Estate, Mitsubishi Corporation, Nomura Real Estate, Patrizia AG, Dexus, Vicinity Centres, Qantas Superannuation amongst others. The funds invest into scalable technology and innovation that enhances real asset sectors, including real estate, infrastructure, and the broader built environment. Taronga Ventures is focused on investing in strategic opportunities and providing its institutional partners first mover advantage, whilst maintaining a focus on creating a better built environment, through sustainable and responsible investment practices. 

Media Contact: 
Renee Rossi 
Renee@relativity.ventures