Velavu

The problem

On construction sites, in mines and in warehouses, crews waste time looking for vehicles, tools and pallets, and GPS does not work indoors or underground. In mining, staff are still sent down to log equipment positions by hand, according to Velavu's exhibitor page for NORCAT's Mining Transformed 2026 event. Conventional location systems often require wired readers and infrastructure work.

The solution

Velavu sells an end-to-end platform: tags and sensors (Arda for assets, Manta and B10 wrist wearables, Dorado for mining), battery-powered Pavo anchors, the Vesta cellular and GPS gateway, plus a web and mobile dashboard with geofencing, alerts and REST and MQTT APIs. The same system follows a vehicle on the road via GPS and takes over indoors through a mesh network.

How it works

1. Pavo anchors, running up to 5 years on coin cells, are mounted on walls or drift walls roughly every 15 m and form a self-healing Wirepas mesh network.
2. Arda tags and Manta wearables, built on Nordic Semiconductor's nRF52833 Bluetooth chip (+8 dBm transmit power), locate themselves by trilateration on signal strength from nearby anchors, with typical accuracy below 3 m.
3. Tags also measure temperature, humidity, motion and impact, and last up to 1 year on a coin cell.
4. Only the Vesta gateway, built around the nRF9160 cellular module, needs connectivity: it pushes data to the cloud over LTE-M and tracks vehicles by GNSS.
5. The software shows asset maps, history and alerts (geofence exit, impact, tool left behind in a vehicle); underground, installation takes under an hour per kilometre of drift, according to the company.

Value proposition

Less time spent searching for equipment, less downtime and no more manual equipment logs underground, according to the company. Cable-free deployment (40 minutes in 4 steps, as claimed on its website) lowers the entry cost compared with wired infrastructure. No customer-measured gains have been published.

Technology edge

Velavu brings long-range tracking (GNSS and LTE-M) and indoor positioning over a Wirepas mesh into a single system. The mesh runs on batteries without wired readers, with anchors rated for 5 years and typical accuracy under 3 m. The team's design background shows in an in-house hardware range that can be customised for a given client.

Business model

B2B: hardware sales (tags, anchors, gateways) bundled with tracking software and an API, plus custom development. Public pricing not disclosed.

Market

MarketsandMarkets (2025) sizes the real-time location systems (RTLS) market at about $6.68 billion in 2025, reaching $15.67 billion by 2030, an 18.6% annual growth rate. Velavu targets industrial segments: mining, construction, transport and logistics, healthcare and defence.

Competitors and alternatives

Zebra Technologies and CenTrak are among the main RTLS vendors listed by MarketsandMarkets, with heavier infrastructure aimed at hospitals and industry. Sweden's Cargo Beacon also runs on Wirepas and advertises 5 m accuracy, a fix every 5 minutes and about 5 years of battery life (eeNews Europe, June 2026). Link Labs partnered with Wirepas in 2022 for asset tracking. Velavu stands out by combining vehicle GPS and indoor mesh in one platform, with a finer claimed accuracy.

Use cases

• An underground mine tags loaders, scissor decks, man-carriers and hand tools, and mounts anchors on drift walls to locate them without GPS, as demonstrated at NORCAT's underground centre.
• A hospitality group rolls the system out across its properties, according to a testimonial from Kinetic Global's CTO on Velavu's website.
• The Royal Canadian Navy funds, through the IDEaS programme, a proof of concept to quickly locate and identify people aboard ships.
• A fleet manager tracks vehicles on the road and gets an alert when a tagged tool is left behind on site.

Traction and proof points

CES Innovation Awards 2022 Honoree in Smart Cities; $199,859 IDEaS contract awarded to Brash in May 2022 to adapt Velavu for Royal Canadian Navy ships; Nordic Semiconductor case study (July 2023); exhibitor at NORCAT's Mining Transformed 2026; several Fortune 100 customers according to Autodesk, none named. CES exhibitor from 2022 to 2026.

What remains to be proven

No industrial customer is publicly named beyond Canadian Defence and one hospitality testimonial, and no deployment volumes are disclosed. The company's own funding is not public, which leaves open its ability to scale manufacturing and sales against established RTLS vendors. The sub-3 m accuracy is a typical figure claimed by the company, not a result measured in mining conditions.