A trio of UBC Okanagan graduating students has received an investment for its tech startup, Linkbase Technologies, which was recently valued at close to $6 million.
The ‘Internet of Things’ company specializes in connecting everyday devices to the cloud, like the smart home products rapidly growing in popularity.
Students Shiven Vinod Khera, Sagar Singh and Brandon Caiza began developing Linkbase in 2019 while completing their undergraduate degrees at UBCO.
“What we really do is we created an extensive IoT platform, which has cloud infrastructure, formative infrastructure, so that people who are wanting to co-create smart devices and trying to connect them to the cloud are able to do that within a matter of days,” Vinod Khera said.
Linkbase also helps manufacturers turn their existing products into smart products by connecting to the cloud using the Linkbase IoT platform. The company was recently valued at $5.6 million.
“Our investors, they really believed in our values and where we’re going,” Singh said. “They want us to scale a little bit more, but they also want us to focus on hospitality and real estate, and that’s actually the value proposition where we’re really locking down and focusing on, especially with these green and smart buildings.”
The company hopes to help the hospitality industry make buildings smarter and more energy efficient.
“It’s a very strenuous process for any building to actually become greener because it’s very expensive,” he said, explaining devices like internet-connected sensors can do things like turn off heating and cooling automatically when a room is unoccupied.
The Linkbase software is expected to be cheaper, more accessible and more efficient for property owners trying to update their buildings’ efficiency and to bring down utility costs.
The team has proved through case studies it can reduce energy consumption by about 42%.
“The building is saving energy, but at the same time, each individual unit within hotels, for example, or property managers for their buildings, they could have that smart experience within rooms itself,” Singh said.
The company plans to expand beyond just the hospitality industry once it feels it has successfully worked with enough hotels.
Vinod Khera says the company came about through plenty of trial and error.
“Linkbase is actually on its third phase, to be very honest. We tried something, it failed, we pivoted, we tried something, it failed again, we pivoted, and the third time is where we’re at,” Vinod Khera said.
“It’s completely changed from where we were. We just had a passion for IoT, and now it’s a complete IoT platform with the extensive cloud infrastructure, the firmware infrastructure.”
The team recently won first place at Okanagan coLab quick pitch competition hosted by UBCO.
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