By Steve Bornhoft
Prevalent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were images of cargo ships logjammed at the nation’s largest ports. As many as 40 vessels idled offshore waiting to dock at the Port of Los Angeles.
Several factors were at play.
Consumer orders for goods had spiked. With stores closed, people began shopping online for items that they ordinarily would have purchased at retailers. Unable to go to the gym, they ordered dumbbells and treadmills. Suddenly working from home, they converted spare bedrooms to offices and ordered desks and file cabinets.
Owing to the pandemic, shortages of truck drivers developed. Ship sizes are now bigger than ever. To make matters worse, many items in transit were pilfered by mobs with access to stationary rail cargo. A lot of PlayStations went missing.
Some of those issues have subsided, others not at all.
“Massive collections of container ships — they’re happening every day, all around the world,” said Randall Shepard, the founder and CEO of RSAE Labs, Inc., a Northwest Florida business in which TechFarms Capital has invested.
How in the world is a shipper to keep track of the condition and location of his precious cargo given the staggering volume of goods moving between points A and B?
Veteran-owned RSAE is a leading provider of worldwide solutions for asset tracking, monitoring and security. It has pioneered advanced IoT (Internet of Things) sensors linked in self-forming, self-healing wireless mesh networks using RSAE’s proprietary RSAEmistTM protocol.
Other mesh networks, Shepard explains, work well to unite static lighting systems or HVAC controls, but RSAEmistTM additionally works well in dynamic environments.
“A pallet tagged with an RSAEmistTM sensor gets removed from the vicinity, breaking the daisy-chain mesh network, and the mesh just re-forms,” Shepard said. “That’s a whole different concept. Self-healing allows you to scale and have mobile applications; that’s our unique swim lane right now, what I call the deep-blue-water market in mobile logistics.”
Think railcars, dry containers and ships at sea. Mobile logistics — that’s RSAE’s sweet spot. Its advanced wireless mesh has been used to monitor fuel, water, mobile bridges, munitions, aircraft components and other valuable goods and assets.
Those missing PlayStations? Many of them were recovered due to RSAE Labs services that enable real-time unauthorized access alerting.
The Department of Defense is among the verticals that figure in RSAE’s business — its RSAEmistTM technology is the only DoD-certified cybersecure IoT protocol. The North American rail industry is also a major adopter of RSAEmistTM technology as the de facto standard for rail telematics.
At this writing, Shepard is negotiating a license agreement with North American railcar supplier TTX, which is owned by Class A rail companies and is the largest owner of railcars in North America,
TTX, Shepard said, anticipates equipping some 1.1 million railcars with RSAEmistTM sensors in the next eight years, and RSAE would receive recurring monthly revenue from each of them. “Smart pallets” equipped with sensors that would make possible the monitoring of cargo inside boxcars represent a strong upselling opportunity as does the monitoring of rail infrastructure like bridges and rail crossings.
Shepard and team have been working on situational awareness, communications and tracking solutions for more than 20 years. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, they developed an onboard system designed to enable sky marshals to communicate with each other, the cockpit, the command center at Cheyenne Mountain and intercepting aircraft.
System prototypes were ready for production when a new director of Homeland Security killed the project’s $100 million budget and used that money to hire Transportation Security Administration personnel.
But Shepard, possessed of new and versatile technology, did what the nimblest of entrepreneurs do. He pivoted, started tracking containers and moved on from there.
Now at a rapid growth phase in its corporate development, it is more critical than ever for RSAE to have a solid partner to help navigate challenges on multiple fronts. Shepard says that “TechFarms Capital and TechFarms are everything a technology partner and incubator should be.”
For RSAE, he said, they have provided:
- Tech-savvy leadership that understands the novelty and potential of our RSAEmistTM technology.
- Depth in finance and fundraising to give RSAE the needed capital for expansion.
- Flexible facility space to support RSAE’s product lifecycle from design and development engineering through prototype production and global operations.
- Mentoring in negotiations and deal making related to RSAE’s large corporate and government institution contracts.
- Legal resources to support RSAE’s IP protection, licensing and contracting.
With RSAEmistTM being adopted as the de facto standard by both the U.S. DoD and North American Rail, RSAE’s advanced technology has transitioned from the Early Adopters phase to adoption by the Early Majority. In doing so, RSAEmistTM has, in the words of author Geoffrey Moore, “crossed the chasm” in its technology adoption lifecycle and is positioned for significant, rapid growth.
Steve Bornhoft is the vice president of marketing and communications at TechFarms.
