Purdue Ventures invests in ‘Startup of the Year’
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Purdue Ventures on Monday announced its investment in Ixana, a West Lafayette-based startup that has developed a high-speed silicon chip it says provides wearable smart devices with the ability to securely communicate via touch.
The investment is part of a $3 million seed round of funding for Ixana, which received “Startup of the Year” at this year’s TechPoint Mira Awards.
Ixana, which also has offices in Seattle, Washington and Bangalore, India, was co-founded by Shreyas Sen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, as well as Purdue alumni Shovan Maity and Angik Sarkar.
Purdue said the Wi-R, or “wire-like wireless,” chip could transform how wearable devices communicate with each other.
Sen, who serves as chief technology officer for Ixana, said the technologies uses the conductive properties of the human body to guide small amounts of Electro-Quasistatic, or EQS, fields around a person.
“This allows high-speed broadband communication among on-body devices to securely communicate at a fraction of the energy cost compared to conventional wireless communication technologies,” Sen said. “This allows wearables to use computing in smartphones without affecting battery power or latency.”
Sen said the high water content in the human body absorbs radio frequency signals, which hurts traditional wireless communications. But the body helps EQS fields, which makes communication more efficient.
“Today, every wearable device has its own CPU and communicates only when required because wireless is inefficient,” Sen said. “Wi-R provides a virtually free ‘wire’ that enables efficient distributed computing on the body; all wearables can piggyback off the computing in the smartphone or another body-worn hub without a significant battery or latency hit. This means every wearable device can have access to real-time AI.”
Sarkar, who serves as CEO of Ixana, said the investment from Purdue Ventures creates multiple benefits.
“Ixana’s North Star is to make Wi-R ubiquitous in devices such as smartphones, smartwatches and AR/VR headsets,” Sarkar said. “Purdue Ventures’ investment moves Ixana closer to that goal. Further, the backing of Purdue Ventures helped leverage more investors to invest in Ixana. Being associated with Purdue University and Purdue Ventures means more partners and investors believe in the technology.”
The seed funding round also included participation from EvoNexus, Hack VC, Paradigm Shift Capital, Samsung Next and Uncorrelated Ventures.
Ixana is licensing Sen’s research into the technology through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization.