The Miovision story is a shining example of the "barn raising" concept so familiar to Waterloo Region, where in the tech world, the feeling is that it takes a community to raise a successful tech business. Started in 2005 by Kurtis McBride, Tony Brijpaul and Kevin Madill, all University of Waterloo engineering graduates, Miovision moved into the Accelerator Centre (AC) to leverage mentoring, service provider connections and facilities.

After tapping into the expertise of the in-house mentors, ecosystem connections that include government funders such as IRAP, OCE & MITACs, service providers, the strong local investment community and Communitech, the company became the first graduate of the Accelerator Program in 2008.

CEO Kurtis McBride remembers well the value of locating at the AC: "The Accelerator Centre provided us with the support and infrastructure needed to allow us to focus on our core business and actually accelerate our business development significantly."

Today, Miovision has more than 90 employees, 400+ customers in 40 countries and a sales office in Köln, Germany to serve its growing European markets. The focus of the company is to solve Global transportation and "Smart City" traffic control and data collection issues that plague increasingly overburdened city infrastructures -- enabling them to become "smarter" cities.

The world's urban(city) population is expected to grow 30% to 6.3 billion people by 2050 creating an explosion in "megacities" (10 million+ people). By 2025, the total number of megacities is expected to reach 37.  These megacities face growing challenges that include demands on aging infrastructure, increasing transportation travel times, decreases in productivity and increasing stresses on the environment.

In the past, many solutions to transportation and traffic-related issues were very labour intensive, using manual systems for collecting data and controlling traffic timing.

Miovision has developed "Smart City" traffic signal technology that allows Cities to reduce traffic congestion and lower CO2 emissions while enhancing driver experience. By connecting traffic intersections using an innovative cloud-based, machine-to-machine (M2M) network infrastructure, Miovision enables Cities to manage traffic by adapting to changes in traffic flow in real time and allowing City Traffic Engineers to control the behaviour of the system. With a cloud-based architecture, Miovision allows Cities to facilitate the availability of traffic data to other City departments and the general public.In the end it's a big win for customers as Cities have a relatively low-cost solution that allows citizens to travel to places faster and more safely at the same time reducing carbon emissions by up to 10%.
 

The second solution from Miovision is their Traffic Data Solution that provides transportation professionals with an end-to-end automated video data collection and management platform. By automating what was previously a labour intensive process, Miovision is quickly becoming a market leader.

Miovision still remembers its roots at the AC and in keeping with the "barn raising" philosophy, is very active mentoring and supporting companies who are beginning their start-up journey in one of the most vibrant and supportive tech centres in the world!