“Innovation Martlesham are absolutely thrilled to have this exciting new international 5G business join our rapidly growing tech cluster, we can’t wait to start working and collaborating with them,” Nicky Daniels, Head of Innovation Martlesham.

UrbanScan is an Israeli 5G IoT company developing a new class of outdoor monitoring platform that yields comprehensive real-time information about vehicles, pedestrians, and other entities in urban settings and beyond. The company’s focus is on security and public safety applications, as well as border surveillance, drone detection, and smart city applications such as smart parking and traffic management.

UrbanScan’s system is based on an array of sensors that receive signals emitted by cellular networks that are reflected by objects in the surrounding area. The system’s setup costs and life-cycle-costs per unit area are significantly lower than those of the alternatives (such as CCTV), making full (100%) coverage of wide outdoor areas feasible for the first time. Furthermore, as an RF-based solution, it can produce accurate information in all lighting and weather conditions. The comprehensive coverage and high availability provide unrivaled context for all detected entities, allowing highly automated scene analysis and rapid response to changing situations.

The system acquires information without personal identifiers, eliminating any potential invasion of privacy. Where necessary (e.g., for security use cases), such information can be added by combining the system’s outputs with other information sources.

The company was formed in 2017 by four Israeli entrepreneurs, having over 100 years of combined experience in system engineering, hardware design, signal processing, data science and machine learning, software architecture and coding, business development, and project management. UrbanScan is represented in the UK by its strategic consultant, Matt Lawson, CEO of Downstream Innovation Ltd.

UrbanScan already has a proof-of-concept as well as multiple patent families, and is currently raising its next financing round. The company has chosen to join Innovation Martlesham to build on its current research and business collaboration discussions with British Telecom and Openreach, covering use case exploration, mutual testing, beta trial-site using the Adastral Park 5G Testbed, and potentially, in due course, joint deployment.

Darren Lewis, Senior Manager, Applied Research Accelerator at BT: “I’m keen to progress with UrbanScan to understand the use cases that might be relevant to BT (own use and sell-through).

There’s some clear alignment with existing strategies that BT has, so I’m excited to see where the best synergies may be.”

Paul Muschamp, Head of Future Communications Research at BT: “I’m really excited that UrbanScan have joined Innovation Martlesham and, when ready, I’m keen to have them on our 5G Testbed at Adastral Park to further test and iterate their solution”

Ahmed Mohamed, Head of Open Innovation, Openreach Chief Engineers Office: “As Head of Open Innovation for Openreach I can see huge potential in securing assets and locations for Openreach across the UK. I look forward to exploring this use case with them and testing it out once they have a field trial prototype available”

Gil Zwirn, UrbanScan’s founder and CEO, as well as the inventor of its core technology: “We see Innovation Martlesham as a great platform for interaction and cooperation with various stakeholders in the BT ecosystem.” Ran Amir, founder and VP Business Development at UrbanScan, adds: “We look forward to exploring opportunities with BT, as well as with sensor system developers and security integrators. The Innovation Martlesham Tech Cluster gives us access to over 120 potential hi-tech business partners to collaborate with.”