GEN Namibia, the Namibian affiliate of Global Entrepreneurship Network wishes to inform the community of entrepreneurs that the team of Pulsar Electronics walked away with the national Entrepreneurship World Cup competition as winners.
Pulsar Electronics emerged victorious through the live online pitching event against 7 other startups in Namibia. In total 58 participants entered the competition, only 8 reached the finals. The Namibian startup pitched GRIDx, an innovative smart metering platform that enables advanced analytics for utilities and provides internet connectivity to households.
The device can also be used for Wi-Fi connection addressing Africa’s internet connectivity. Delano January represented his team, which, also consists of Kamati Hasheela, Morne Fourie, Adrian Larreal and Noble Mutoko. Amazing the team brings together the global village together with the GRIDx; Adrian from the Texas in USA, 3 Namibians namely Kamati, Delano and Morne and Noble from Zimbabwe.
Pulsar Electronics was followed by Black Gold represented by Pedro da Fonseca, a local company that manufactures LED lamps with savings up to 70%. Pedro tied second place with Pelgrina Ndumba, co-founder of an application called ‘Talk to Me’ aimed at assisting visually impaired people access to research and other documented materials they can otherwise not decipher.
GRIDx is an integrated smart meter and Wi-Fi router designed in Namibia by Pulsar Electronic Solutions targeted at solving electricity metering and internet penetration problems in Africa. The device integrates smart metering capabilities with telecommunication technologies to enable home Wi-Fi networks through 4G, 3G, and fiber to the home.
The meter offers electric utilities the capability to collect power consumption information to make more informed, data-driven decisions improve and increase reliability of electric distribution systems. The hardware of the device incorporates long-range (LoRa) technology for communication in the unlicensed sub-gigahertz frequency band with G-3 PLC configuration also an option. In the absence of LoRa networks, the device has an onboard GSM module which allows for data transmission using cellular network technologies. For home users, the meter has built-in hardware to allow the user to remotely transmit their electricity tokens to the meter and remotely schedule their geysers. GRIDx also has its own web-based platform and mobile application for direct purchase and transmission of electricity tokens from anywhere with an mobile connection.
With the focus of bringing Wi-Fi connectivity to homes, GRIDx is designed to work as a 4G (with backwards compatibility with 3G) router or accept a fiber-optic input to set-up a local area network (LAN) in the home. This is to allow for utilities to work together with their local internet service providers (ISPs) to bring internet connectivity to each home. The integrated device also eases the implementation for utilities that want to explore the ISP business model. Pulsar Electronic Solutions has received a patent for a device that integrates the described functionalities in one unit here in Namibia, the company is also working together with the patent office to receive a patent for the African region.
The team is comprising of the following types of engineers Electronics, Software and Mechanical from the Southern African region. The Key Members are Kamati Hasheela, Adrian Larreal, Morne Fourie, Delano January, Ottilie Mungungu. Winning the 2019 Development Bank of Namibia Innovation award and forms part of the BFS Incubation Program in Namibia, are a few of the team’s achievements.
We could not have done this without the support of the MISK Global Forum, tGELG and the Global Entrepreneurship Network. Locally we were supported by the International University of Management, Radio Energy 100FM and GEN Namibia.
We thank all the participants, the judges and the supporters. See you in 2021.
