Smart city technology developer Quantela to receive $10 million investment

Quantela, a smart city automation and artificial intelligence developer, says it is receiving a $10 million equity investment from Digital Alpha to scale its global business.

Digital Alpha will also fund innovative revenue-sharing financing for key public sector customers around the world.

Silicon Valley-headquartered Quantela is using the $10m investment by Digital Alpha for market expansion and to enable a deeper presence in strategic locations across the US and Europe. 

Digital Alpha says it views Quantela as an “important complement” to its smart cities strategy.

Quantela has achieved 100 per cent annual growth on revenues year-over-year and is keen on deepening its presence in target markets.

Quantela’s flagship platform, “Atlantis”, is an artificial intelligence platform that helps its customers make smarter urban infrastructure utilization decisions.

Atlantis uses advances in data aggregation, operational intelligence, deep learning and machine learning to enable urban service providers, cities and communities and other organizations to efficiently handle large volumes of real-time and historical data from IoT, open data sources and operational technology to make better-informed decisions.

Speaking about the investment, Sridhar Gadhi, CEO and founder of Quantela, says: “Smart cities and communities are a reality that all of us are experiencing and data sits at the heart of this. Over the years, we worked with various smart city and community projects.

“This gave us the market intelligence needed to tune our products to the needs of cities and communities.

“This investment and strategic partnership are helping us to accelerate our product development to meet the demands of both developed and developing economies. By offering outcome-based services, we will accelerate the realization of benefits to the society by deploying smart solutions.

“We are excited for the next phase of growth into the US and Europe markets. We firmly believe that with mutual synergies with Digital Alpha, we can disrupt the way digital services are designed and deployed in cities and communities.”

Founded in 2014, Quantela has delivered and deployed the Atlantis platform to dozens of cities and communities including some 40 sites across the US, Europe, and Asia with key contracts in place around the world.

Quantela claims it has become “a leading player in the smart cities and communities segment worldwide”.

Rick Shrotri, managing partner at Digital Alpha, says: “Our investment into Quantela marks the continuation of an exciting journey for us to focus on breakthrough platforms for smart cities and IoT.

“Quantela has distinguished itself with clear market-leading capabilities when it comes to the automation needed to enable smart cities, driven in part by its powerful artificial intelligence platform.

“Moreover, through our discussions with city leaders such as the CIO of Las Vegas, the CEO of the Erie Innovation District, and leading partners like PTC and L&T, we’ve seen convincing evidence of successful deployments and technical capabilities.

“We are pleased to provide additional capital to help Quantela scale its global footprint and to also enable new, equity-driven, revenue-sharing models that can help cities deploy smart services more rapidly.

“Digital Alpha enjoys a strategic relationship with Cisco and as a part of its charter has had a focus on IoT and smart cities.

“One of the segments Digital Alpha and Cisco are looking to pursue is in large-scale data center solutions, aimed at building in-country, sovereign cloud environments.

“With our investment into Quantela, we can shape new product lines that are pre-packaged with Cisco’s data center offering, which can then be offered to cities with innovative financing options that are otherwise not available in the market.

“We are pleased to partner with an already-successful company that has tremendous potential to scale and define the smart city market for decades to come.”

As part of its expansion, Quantela will also be setting up centers of excellence in the US, Europe and Asia. These centers will foster research and development of local solutions fitting the requirements of smart cities and communities.

On the investment, Amr Salem, head of global public sector, Cisco, says: “Cisco is recognized as a leader in the development of smart cities for our ability to bring together technology, innovation, strategic thought leadership, and a powerful ecosystem of partners.

“Quantela will package their solutions with Cisco’s data center solutions and the Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform into a unique, single service offering. Digital Alpha’s investment will undoubtedly open new avenues for Cisco and Quantela to scale our joint proposition to cities and communities.”