Miovision partners with Kitchener’s Swift Labs for Smart City product design

Kitchener, Ontario traffic systems technology company Miovision has selected local company Swift Labs, an end-to-end product development start-up, to design, develop and test Miovision’s new hardware prototypes and products.

After Miovision put up a request for proposal, Swift Labs produced a fully functional prototype of a patented design within seven weeks, a design that “stretched the laws of physics, beyond what we thought was possible,” said Miovision CEO Kurtis McBride.

“I believe in Kurtis McBride’s vision for smart cities,” said Swift Labs CEO Anthony Middleton. “With that mindset, I didn’t hesitate to work closely with Miovision during the RFP process to better understand the use case, the process and the road map. Our partnership naturally evolved as Swift Labs product designs hit the mark at a strategic level as well as fit into today’s requirements.”

Although it helps that Swift Labs is a local company, the synergies obviously don’t end there.
“We believe in promoting and working with local entrepreneurs where possible,” said Miovision CEO Kurtis McBride. “Swift Labs is an expert in design, having the skills to bring concepts with strict parameters into a truly innovative and technically sound product—all of which will comply with international regulations.”

At the end of their successful RFP design process, Swift Labs has been invited by Miovision to partner on future products, allowing the two companies to collaborate on product design, testing and certification at an accelerated rate, building on the Smart Cities concepts that Miovision has already deployed, which allow cities to manage traffic flow and decrease traffic congestion using technology.

“I am pleased to work with Kurtis McBride and his team on products that stretch and challenge the status quo of technology,” said Middleton.  “Our team at Swift Labs brings decades of expertise in wireless engineering and testing, allowing us to open new roads in functionality for the visionary software developed by Miovision.”

Swift Labs provides in-house RF/Protocol testing, prototype and hardware design and builds development platforms and products to support wireless radio bring up (cellular, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and Sub-1GHz), antenna design, and low power consumption, while also managing regulatory and compliance for clients who are developing wireless products.

Miovision, which now serves over 650 customers in 50 countries, turned 10 years old last year, at which point Miovision CEO Kurtis McBride talked to Cantech Letter about his company’s plans to build nothing less than “the operating system of the smart city”, saying, “We think that there’s a whole layer of public policy that’s implemented into the road networks that isn’t possible to implement inside a single car. It has to be implemented in a centralized way. So we think a lot of the stuff we’re building will lend itself to that migration. When you drive into Waterloo, your car will essentially register itself into the local policy administration layer and get inputs about how it has to behave in the network. And I think we’re pretty well positioned to do that kind of thing.”

Last February, Miovision closed a $30 million Series B financing round, led by MacKinnon, Bennett & Co., with assists from Investeco Capital, Renewal Funds, Plaza Ventures and Comerica.