By José Angel Lorenzo, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, MatrixSpace
Today marks a personal journey for MatrixSpace and for me personally – our long-awaited public introduction.
MatrixSpace marks a two-and-a-half-year journey which Greg Waters, co-founder and Executive Chair and I began in December of 2019 in a San Francisco cafeteria. We were attempting to solve a problem that everyone kept discussing with me: How can we connect people and smart machines in a ubiquitous way? How can we support edge data processing faster and easier so that we can use the information that is available to us immediately—not after the fact. My friends were all complaining that while IIoT was supposed to be the holy grail, it was failing and failing miserably. The ability for a sensor to communicate to a human or machine to enable real-time decision making was non-existent. Decisions were having to be made much later when video and information could be obtained.
Furthermore, everyone was complaining that each sensor stood alone, unable to communicate with one another. They could not share pertinent information to enable the stronger and critical decision making IIoT promised.
Our goal was simple – change this so that communications and the associated information exchange could happen on a real-time basis.
We knew how we could solve this. Combining my knowledge on millimeter wave sensing and imaging, with Greg’s business leadership and vision of what we could do, coupled with the opportunity of using the unique facilities that Northeastern University has in its innovation campus in Burlington, MA. So we created MatrixSpace. We knew we wanted a name that represented the power of where we could go and the fact that we believe there are no boundaries.
Soon we presented our company to Dan Nobbe and Matt Kling, who also saw the vision and joined our team. Each of them is leading the development of a new solution that offers edge sensing – the power of AI along with a communications network that could go very long distances and at the same time offer and support a robust bandwidth capacity. We thought about this in a rule of threes – sort of like the old Star Trek Tri-Coder. As our work started to take form and shape, Greg reached out to his business partners, who also understood our vision and the possibility of what MatrixSpace could be. It’s a founder’s dream to have investors such as Mark Twaalfhoven and David St John who are industry legends in their respective fields. They have already spent considerable time with us, helping shape the company’s future.
The launch is only the beginning. Our R&D team is working around the clock – still in that basement area here at Northeastern University creating new applications and solutions this framework can support. Every day we come to work with the goal of making the world a better place and taking advantage of the benefits that technology can offer but at a level that is easy and simple for everyone to be able to benefit.
Welcome to our journey – we’re excited to share our story.
Learn more at MatrixSpace Radar, Digitizing the Outdoors, and Smart Cities.