Daniel Campion and Brian Sexton. Image: Sitenna
A platform that connects mobile operators with sites for 5G deployment, Sitenna has now set its eyes on the US.
Sitenna, one of the five Irish start-ups selected for Y Combinator last year, has raised $2.1m in seed funding to grow its cloud software platform for the telecoms industry.
With offices in Limerick, London and Birmingham, the start-up connects mobile operators with landlords for sites that can host telecoms equipment.
Sitenna has secured the seed funding from Y Combinator, Samsung Next, Silicon Valley VC firm Merus Capital and a group of angel investors.
It will use the funding to expand its business in the US after a launch in the UK market last year.
With the roll-out of 5G technology, mobile operators are looking to significantly increase their site numbers and Sitenna aims to help them secure contracts faster. The start-up says identifying and securing a site can take up to 24 months and claims it can bring the process down to just six months, saving companies money.
Its software provides tools for landlords, local authorities, infrastructure providers and mobile operators to search, assess and transact.
Daniel Campion, co-founder and chief executive of Sitenna, said the telecoms market is “ripe for disruption with billions of dollars being inefficiently spent on network processes that are still based on the days of 2G”.
He added that the recent investment is a “huge vote of confidence” in what the company is trying to bring to market.
Campion, who studied commerce at University College Dublin, told TechCrunch that after launching Sitenna in the UK last summer, 65,000 real estate assets and roughly 15pc of the towers in the country were on the platform.
Founded in 2020 by Campion and Brian Sexton, the company has also secured pilots with Vodafone and tower provider Cornerstone.
Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Y Combinator is one of the world’s most prestigious early-stage start-up accelerators. Along with Sitenna, the other four start-ups with Irish connections in its summer 2021 batch were Luminate Medical, Noloco, Protex AI and Artillery.io.
The accelerator has previously churned out major players such as Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase and Reddit. Some recent Irish-linked start-ups to be backed by Y Combinator include Milk Video, Inscribe, Klir and Quorum.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
