Safecility

Making buildings smarter and safer

In the UK, fire emergency lighting is legally required to be tested four times a year; normally as an on-site manual process, this can be extremely laborious and failures can still occur undetected between tests. Safecility automates testing, freeing up resources, and providing vital compliance data in real time.

FED4SAE support

The Safecility team answered the Horizon 2020 FED4SAE open application for startups looking to gain support from the programme, a network of innovation hubs across Europe that boosts and sustains industrial digitisation. With support from Digital Catapult, the programme focuses on strengthening competitiveness in cyber physical systems (CPS) and the internet of things (IoT). It is designed for companies with products and services that integrate physical and computer-based processes, and embedded system markets.

Digital Catapult introduced Safecility to the programme and helped shape the proposal was successful, resulting in €60,000 in funding from the Horizon 2020 FED4SAE project.

“The money meant that we could focus and achieve milestones. It also gave us more confidence to approach larger companies – H2020 is a huge mark of approval.” said Cian O’Flaherty, Founder and CEO.

Developing the proof of concept

Digital Catapult’s support meant not only access to technical expertise and resources for development and testing, it also meant that Safecility could develop its proof of concept for a market-ready product and commercial plan.

The Safecility team found Digital Catapult’s expert advice to be extremely helpful, and benefited from attending workshops and receiving constructive feedback on business planning, including market positioning and pricing.

Safecility was able to connect and build relationships with microcontroller specialists, ST Microelectronics, resulting in the solution’s successful implementation using the ST microcontroller BL072Z, as validated on the Digital Catapult LoRa testbed infrastructure in London.

Since then, thanks to further introductions by Digital Catapult, Safecility has had conversations with many more potential investors and partners, giving them access to a huge network of large and small businesses.

Long-term legacy

Developing and validating this type of sensor technology using LoRa has the future potential to offer a wide range of applications which would tackle additional statutory building compliance testing in smart cities. It has proven that it is possible to develop a DALI-enabled sensor at the edge, creating a new network topology for wireless control and implementing a new and innovative messaging system.

Safecility’s work will contribute to reducing human error or failures, resulting in safer buildings and protecting their occupants.

In October 2020, Safecility was shortlisted by LUX for the Lux Awards 2020 Emergency Lighting Product of the Year.