Long live the new Bluetooth King
Today, almost everybody is familiar with Bluetooth protocol, a wireless technology for transferring data between two devices that are in close proximity with each other. It’s implemented on all smartphones but also millions of earphones, laptops, speakers, cars etc… Nearly 4 billion Bluetooth devices are expected to ship in 2018, nearly twice as much as 2013 (2.4Bn). This year, 86% of new cars, trucks and SUVs shipped will come with Bluetooth.
Bluetooth protocol was originally invented in the early nineties by Ericsson and has subsequently been managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) which has more than 30,000 member companies.
Fewer people know that the name “Bluetooth” is an Anglicised version of the Scandinavian Blåtand, the nickname of the tenth-century king Harald Bluetooth who united Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The idea is that, like the king, Bluetooth unites communications protocols. The Bluetooth logo is even a rune symbol merging Harald’s initials.
Since its inception, Bluetooth has been regularly improved by the SIG, adding more security and faster data transfer rate. In 2011, its fourth iteration introduced Bluetooth low energy (BLE) which uses the same frequency as traditional Bluetooth (2.4GHz) but requires much less power: about a tenth of what Bluetooth or Wifi would need for similar use cases.
Bluetooth chipsets are relatively cheap to implement. With significant volume, each costs only a few pennies. Its presence in billions of devices makes it the most widely adopted Personal Area Network technology, and for good reasons. The explosion of IoT devices will keep fuelling the need for Bluetooth’s continued development.
That said, as a core and ubiquitous technology, Bluetooth is not living up to its potential: security is not robust (cf Bluesnarfing attack), BLE’s data rate is not as good as standard Bluetooth, the user experience is often sub-optimal, seamless pairing of multiple accessories from different manufacturers is non-existent, Bluetooth audio doesn’t support multi-speaker configuration, and so much more…
Combine the massive potential for stack-level improvement with the fact that Bluetooth lies at the intersection of two of our investment themes: Hardware and Media, and we could not ask for a better investment opportunity than Tempow.
We met Vincent, Julien and Thomas 2 years ago. At that time, they were building a hardware solution to provide a multi-speaker experience: a way to broadcast music to several speakers at the same time, either in different rooms, or in the same room to create stereo/spatial sound or just to have a richer sound experience.
Today Multi-Speaker is possible only with a handful of solutions: Apple AirPlay and Sonos being the main ones. They both address the high-end market with solutions that cost several hundred or even thousands of euros. On the other end, a lot of people have multiple Bluetooth speakers of heterogenous cost and quality at home, but because Bluetooth protocol is based on a point to point connection, there is not easy way to use them in a multi-speaker mode.
Even if we’re one of the few funds which love hardware, we didn’t think a hardware route was the right way forward for Tempow to address this issue. Tempow worked on an alternative and finally cracked the multi-speaker use-cases using software only. They have already signed deals to distribute the solution with global handset manufacturers, including Motorola.
Over these two years, we’ve been blown away by the team at Tempow and what they’ve been able to achieve. With our friends at Balderton, we invested in Tempow’s Series A to give them the resources and support to go further in their quest to dramatically reimagine what can be done with the Bluetooth protocol..
King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson died about 1000 years ago, but Tempow and its founders have the ambition, the skillset, the drive and charisma to be crowned New King of Bluetooth.
Long live the king!
OH.
