Roambee lands $2 million investment for asset tracking system

Logistics technology firm Roambee Corp. will expand its supply chain asset-tracking technology to Southeast Asia after receiving a $2 million investment from MDI Ventures, Telkom Indonesia's corporate venture capital firm, the company said Thursday.

The investment brings Santa Clara, Calif.-based Roambee to nearly $10 million in total funding, following a 2017 injection of $3.1 million investment from German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom.

The latest funds will fuel Roambee's entry into Indonesia and Southeast Asia's logistics market, with a focus on serving Telkom Indonesia, the largest telecommunication services company in Indonesia, as its first customer.

MDI Ventures chose to invest in Roambee due to its solution's ability to track, trace, and monitor in real-time through a broad array of sensors, while simultaneously doing analytics and predictive reporting, the firm said.

Roambee makes a networked tracking device called the "Bee," a hardware block about the size of two Apple iPhones that supports a variety of sensors and sends data to cloud storage platforms over cell phone networks as it travels with assets and inventory.

Several other large players have launched products in recent years targeting the market for track and trace and Internet of Things (IoT) applications in logistics, including a Honeywell International Inc. system for tracking high-value and perishable goods and an asset-tracking tag for truck trailers and containers from smartphone pioneer BlackBerry Ltd.