Wi-Fi came out of CSIRO in Australia in the 1990s. Now a Sydney company is rebuilding it from scratch, and almost nobody here has heard of them.
The company
Morse Micro was founded in Sydney in 2016 by two ex-Broadcom engineers, Michael De Nil and Andrew Terry. They have built the smallest, longest range, lowest power Wi-Fi chip in the world.
What the chip does
- Sends a Wi-Fi signal up to 1 kilometre in cities
- Up to 16 kilometres in rural areas
- A single access point can support thousands of connected devices
The wild part
Some of the original CSIRO inventors of Wi-Fi are connected to the company, including Professor Neil Weste and Dr John O’Sullivan. The same Aussies who invented Wi-Fi are helping reinvent it.
The money
Over A$290 million raised to date. The last round was an $88 million Series C led by Japan’s MegaChips, with $35 million from the Federal Government’s National Reconstruction Fund.
My read
Morse Micro is Australia’s largest semiconductor company, and it is taking the next generation of Wi-Fi global. For a country that usually invents something and lets someone else build it, this is the opposite.