Dear ,
Focal Point was founded in June 2015 with Dr Ramsey Faragher as CEO and CTO. The team had originally worked on a range of platforms seeking to improve the navigational and positioning systems on vehicles as diverse as submarines and Martian rovers. They then decided to bring that 30 years of combined knowledge to bear on the problem of accurate positioning for smartphones and autonomous platforms indoors and out.
The Technology
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) provide geolocation and time information to GPS receivers, such as those in smartphones. This works well outdoors, but, indoors and in densely packed urban areas, highly attenuated signals and multiple reflections off walls make it very difficult to determine position. The current error range is around that of a tennis court. This is too large in the context of, for example, emergency personnel in hazardous environments or autonomous vehicles in cities.
Focal Point has developed algorithms which combine the phone’s motion data (gathered from the accelerometers within the device) with the radio signals received from the GPS. Super-tight coupling of these measurements provide improvements in the sensitivity and accuracy of the GPS radio measurements, resulting in better positioning in difficult environments. Accuracy can be further improved by combining this data with local sources of stronger radio signals (e.g. local television and cellular broadcasts). Critically the Focal Point solution is software-based so does not require hardware investment.
IP
Focal Point has over half a dozen patents in various stages of examination at present with their first filings now at the grant stage.
The Market Opportunity
There is a strong demand for accurate indoor GPS location for devices from commercial operators and there is a regulatory push from bodies such as the Federal Communications Commission in the US. Focal Point is well placed to deliver a solution.
Focal Point is working on two software products currently. S-GPS (firmware) is an upgrade to existing SOC solutions and will allow smartphones to provide accurate indoor positioning data. D-Tail (activity tracking app) is part of the S-GPS system but will also be developed as a stand-alone inertial tracking app. It will allow users to track their movement in three dimensions using the inertial sensors in wearables or smartphones.
Focal Point’s initial accessible market will be a subset of the $tn overall locations-based services market, related to the volume of chipsets in smartphones and estimated by the company to be worth upwards of $120m p.a.
The Team
Dr. Ramsey Faragher, Chief Executive Officer & Chief Technical Officer, is a world-leading expert in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denied positioning, having developed the NAVSOP opportunistic positioning suite, the first on-device real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) based indoor positioning system for smartphones and other tracking technologies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, a Bye Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge and has picked up numerous awards for his work over the last ten years.
Darren Buckle, General Manager, was Business Development Manager at BAe Systems Advanced Technology Centre previously. He holds an engineering degree from Loughborough University and an MBA in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design from Imperial College London.
Dr Nicolas Coronneau holds a 1st class degree in Mathematics and Physics, a degree in electrical engineering from Supélec (France), and a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge. His PhD research was on the detection and tracking of GPS signals in difficult signal environments. Previously he worked at the BAe Systems Advanced Technology Centre where he developed a range of technologies for autonomous vehicles in the fields of navigation, sensor fusion and machine learning.
Dr Mark Crockett holds a first class degree in Physics and a PhD in Astrophysics, both from Queen’s University Belfast. He is a Chartered Physicist and a Member of the Institute of Physics. Mark previously worked at BAe Systems Advanced Technology Centre, where he collaborated with Dr Faragher on NAVSOP, and as a Research Scientist at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Labs, involved in the development of new technologies spanning the navigation, positioning and security domains.
Oliver Chick is the Principal Software Engineer at Focal Point. He was awarded a distinction and university prize for his undergraduate computer science degree from the University of Cambridge. He continued at Cambridge to read a PhD, also in computer science, producing award-winning research by creating new techniques to comprehend the performance of contemporary software. Subsequently he worked as a software engineer at Citrix and Google.
Henry Martin is a Senior Software Engineer at Focal Point. He holds a Master of Mathematics degree from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Advanced Mechanical Engineering from Cranfield University and a PhD from UCL. His PhD focused on accurate low-cost inertial navigation covering the stability-limits of current integration techniques; calibration techniques requiring no specialised equipment; and combining arrays of inertial sensors to provide high quality signals despite changing environmental conditions.
The Investment Case
Focal Point has used seed funding to build out a team and develop the product. The next stage in development is to demonstrate the product to customers. Following the launch in late 2016 the company has received significant interest from major corporates, who are currently testing the software.
We are confident that the team has the capabilities and the products to deliver on its early promise and to capitalise on a growing market.
