Fittingly for a company that just landed a big new contract with a major U.S. airport, Teldio is gaining altitude in a hurry.
The Terry Matthews-backed software firm has been a steady performer over the past 13 years, gaining a list of customers that includes manufacturing and consumer goods giants Nissan, 3M and Proctor and Gamble.
For most of its history, Teldio has helped front-office users of Mitel phones connect with workers in the field or on the factory floor, tracking their movements via sensors embedded in two-way radios.
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But over the past 18 months, the Kanata company has been branching out in a bid to cash in on the proliferation of devices in what’s known as the Internet of Things – items from cars to fridges that wirelessly communicate with each other to allow consumers to, say, turn up their thermostats using their smartphones.
CEO Peter Kuciak says Teldio’s sensors are poised to play a role in the IoT boom by helping to make connected devices even smarter.
“We’re solving real-life challenges that help corporations get faster and more automated,” says Kuciak, a former VP of research and development at March Networks who assumed the top job at Teldio in February 2020. “It’s a very easy conversation with customers.”
“It’s a very easy conversation with customers.”
Teldio recently signed a contract to deploy its technology at Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport. The system will be linked to everything from fire extinguishers to defibrillators, alerting terminal workers in real time whenever medical or safety devices are deployed and instantly notifying first responders of the exact location where they’re being used.
Kuciak says clients in industries beyond the firm’s traditional manufacturing customer base, including hospitality, health care and education, are all seeing the value in its technology. The company has already surpassed its third-quarter revenue targets as it grows its geographical and industry footprints.
In addition, Teldio is changing the way it sells its products, shifting away from traditional perpetual licensing agreements that saw it charge customers hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront to the subscription-based software-as-a-service model now preferred by most tech firms.
Kuciak expects the SaaS approach to pay off as the company ramps up R&D efforts aimed at adding new capabilities to its software, allowing the firm to charge monthly premiums for additional services.
Merger talks
“We’re like a Swiss Army knife for a lot of customers,” he says. “We’re pretty excited.”
Now at 24 employees, Teldio has received financial backing from Wesley Clover, the Kanata-based investment firm founded by tech magnate Terry Matthews, as well as friends-and-family funding.
The company is now in talks with Encore Networks – a Virginia-based manufacturer of 5G networking equipment that’s also led by Kuciak and backed by Wesley Clover – about a potential merger.
And its CEO isn’t ruling out the possibility of taking Teldio public – the route chosen by another fast-growing Wesley Clover portfolio company, Martello Technologies, several years ago.
“Things like that are always an option,” Kuciak says. “Right now, we’re focusing on making sure that we have a fantastic product-market fit. We have some very excited investors that are looking at us to see if we can accelerate our growth.”
