Bluetooth start-up company Blecon, founded by IoT experts from Arm, AWS and Microsoft, announced its first product at last week’s Hardware Pioneers Max show in London.

Its flagship product brings IoT connectivity based on Bluetooth Low Energy, offering a practical approach that simplifies and democratises the use of Bluetooth for IoT applications.

“Bluetooth LE is now being used ever more widely in IoT connectivity use-cases, building upon its remarkable technical and commercial success in personal connectivity and tracking beacons,” said Simon Ford, CEO of Blecon. “Despite the challenges companies face in adapting BLE for these applications, the benefits are driving adoption.”

At the show, Ford explained his background, spending time working at Arm on its Neon project, which he said was “the start of the smartphone revolution”.

“This got me to the offices of people like Nokia and Ericsson where I came across the technology that was to become Bluetooth,” he said.

Bluetooth LE is one of the most successful and widely adopted wireless standards. As a trusted, low-cost, and low-power radio technology, it has achieved unparalleled market penetration in the consumer peripheral device and industrial beacon tracking markets. This widespread adoption has enabled Bluetooth LE to benefit from exceptional economies of scale, with billions of enabled edge devices shipped worldwide and the host technology readily available in virtually every smartphone and laptop.

This has led to its application in a diverse range of low-cost IoT connectivity applications despite the need for bespoke options to make it a reality. Blecon was established in response to the team’s exposure to companies that consistently encountered difficulties when applying Bluetooth to IoT connectivity applications.

“A lot of companies are trying to do Bluetooth LE for IoT, and are struggling,” said Ford.

Blecon is building on the Bluetooth standard by incorporating a robust architecture, security measures and components to enable seamless communication between devices and cloud applications via nearby hotspots.

The firm’s modems provide firmware and libraries to enable standard Bluetooth LE microcontrollers to have trusted identity, robust security and reliable network communications. Hotspots provide dedicated hardware and mobile apps enabling a simple and efficient way to deploy coverage wherever it is needed, without configuration or pairing. And a cloud-based network facilitates secure identity, bi-directional cloud communication, geolocation, and time services for devices, routing requests to their cloud applications.

Blecon lets its customers self-deploy hardware hotspots and enable existing phones and laptops as hotspots using apps, without the need for skilled professionals to install and configure devices on-site, resulting in lower deployment costs.

Maintaining an IoT infrastructure can be costly, especially when using custom, in-house technology. By adopting Blecon, companies can leverage this technology to handle a significant portion of the operational responsibilities, thereby reducing ongoing costs.

Blecon also eliminates the need for effort and skills to develop custom gateways, apps, and extensive system and security.

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Cambridge, UK, Blecon (www.blecon.net) combines the benefits of Bluetooth LE with the deployment model of wifi and the network model of cellular to achieve low-cost and low-power IoT connectivity.

The US launch for the company is set for October at Embedded World (www.embedded-world.de/en/embedded-world-wide/embedded-world-north-america) in Austin, Texas.