Whizpace boosts connectivity beyond Singapore

They offer solutions for wireless broadband connectivity.

When Whizpace co-founder Pankaj Sharma began showing his friends some initial TV White Space deployments across Singapore, his wife spotted that the product failed to carry a label and a brand. The white box had already been deployed at Gardens by the Bay, Sentosa, and China Town, and Sharma and his CEO, Dr. Oh Ser Wah thought that maybe, the time had come to get the ball rolling.

When Whizpace was selected for investment by Javelin Startup-O Victory Fund, it was still in the very early stage of its entrepreneurship journey. It was eventually shortlisted after 5-6 rounds of intensive online interviews with various experts on the platform. “This helped us develop a solid business roadmap, gave us access to a strong network of industry experts and investors and expedited our fund raising process,” adds Sharma.

Officially born in 2016, Whizpace operates on the license exempted band of TVWS and offers solutions for wireless broadband connectivity to an unconnected population of roughly 3-4 billion (O3B) and IoT communication to connect 50 billion potential devices in the near future, without congestion and at a much lower cost. Sharma says that their technology has the ability to propagate over longer distances and has a high throughput and better penetration through obstacles and thick foliage.

“We are the only TVWS company which has the solutions to address the connectivity needs for back-haul, middle-mile and last mile using various Whiz brands. Similar to other sharing economy models such as Uber and Airbnb our products utilise the valuable resource in a dynamic manner, thus greatly improving spectrum utilization rates,” Sharma adds.

Sharma and Dr. Oh were already in the middle of their scientific careers at A*STAR, Singapore’s national research organisation, when they developed the core technology of Whizpace. Since then, the two have been receiving support from various agencies in Singapore to further develop their technology, license the IPR, and widen market reach, among others. Whizpace also bagged the grant from Spring Seeds for product development and subsequently received the investment from GreenMeadows Accelerator (GMA) & SPRING Seed Capital co-matched investment.

Whizpace has not only deployed its equipment in Singapore, but has also piqued interest in developing countries like India and the Philippines, where there a huge chunk of the populations are still offline. So far, Whizpace has raised an investment of around S$1.2m as pre-A stage and a grant of S$500,000 from Spring. They are currently open for the second round of S$2m.