Modern Radio Technologies (SRT)

The company "Modern Radio Technologies" (SRT) is a manufacturer of sensors and network solutions for the Internet of Things under the brand name "Strige," used in telemetry systems in the areas of housing and communal services, security, smart cities and agriculture.

The development of solutions under the Strizh brand began in 2010 with partners Andrei Sinitsin and Yevgeny Akhmadishin, and in 2014 they managed to attract the attention of President Vladimir Putin. But in 2016, partners diverged views and divided the business.

Yevgeny Akhmadishin headed a project on similar topics "Vaviot" and in 2017 was arrested. Andrei Sinitsin lost the business to the creators of the Plato system Igor Rotenberg and Alexander Shipelov.

History

2020: New Co-Owner

Since July 2020, Igor Rotenberg's share has passed to DFA Capital, owned by his partner Dmitry Afanasenko.

2019: CRT may become a monopolist in the market of smart electric meters

On February 7, 2019, it became known about the plans of the Ministry of Communications to make the technologies of the company Modern Radio Technologies (SRT, operates under the Strizh brand) mandatory for smart electric meters. Deputy Minister of Digital Development Alexei Sokolov sent a letter with this proposal to the Ministry of Energy.

According to Vedomosti,  it is proposed to use the LPWAN radio technology and the XNB protocol developed by the CRT to transfer data from intelligent accounting systems. If this proposal is supported, then the company, which is 45% owned by Igor Rotenberg, will actually become a monopolist in the market of smart electric meters.

The Ministry of Communications has offered a monopolist in the market of "smart" electric meters

XNB is a closed protocol, that is, other manufacturers, in addition to CRT, cannot use it, explained Nikita Utkin, chairman of the Cyber-Physical Systems technical committee under Rosstandart.

A representative of the Ministry of Communications told Vedomosti that by February 7, 2019 the issue was being worked out. The agency considers it important that the market for smart meters be open to all Russian manufacturers. According to the official, various options are being discussed, including the "opening" of the CRT protocol and the use of other ranges.

In 2018, a law was adopted on the development of intelligent accounting systems in Russia. Starting in June 2020, network and resource-supplying organizations will install new metering devices in apartments as old ones fail. Smart equipment is able to transmit energy consumption data itself and signal a hack or malfunction.  

The introduction of such meters may require 40-60 billion rubles a year during 2022-2030. - During this time, the bulk of the devices will be replaced, estimates Vygon Consulting senior consultant Nikolai Posypanko^[1] 

As of August 2019, Modern Radio Technologies LLC was part of RT-Invest.

2018

New owners - Igor Rotenberg and Igor Shipelov

In 2018, the company "Modern Radio Technologies" (SRT) changed its ownership. According to the Kontur.Focus database, its original founder Andrei Sinitsin, who owned 80% of the company, left the company.

His share passed to two new co-founders: businessmen Igor Rotenberg and Andrei Shipelov. The first since October owns a share of 45%, the second - since June a share of 35%.

The share of another co-founder - Pavel Staryuk, who joined the company in 2017, remained unchanged and amounts to 20%.

Since October, the management company of SRT has been listed as Glonass-Tm. Among its ultimate owners are also Igor Rotenberg and Igor Shipelov.

Andrei Sinitsin chose not to comment on TAdviser changing the company's owners. They could not comment on it in the CPT at the time of publication of the material. The SRT secretary refused to connect by phone with PR manager Pavel Heiderich.

STR is developing the Strige IoT platform based on wireless LPWAN networks "(photo - strij.tech)"

The Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications Konstantin Noskov in an interview with TAdviser in October said that he expects an increase in demand for sensors for the Internet of Things and cited this direction as an example, talking about possible areas of investment of large businesses in the framework of the national project "Digital Economy."

Rotenberg and Shipelov are partners in other businesses. For example, the Plato Road Charging System. They are co-founders of RT-Invest Transport Systems, which acts as the Plato operator.

In 2017, the partners also bought 45% of the National Telematic Systems (NTS) holding, created by the former vice president of Rostelecom"." Alexei Nashchekin

Termination of Vaviot

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in April 2018, Vaviot LLC ceased operations. At the same time, as of October 2018, the Telematic Solutions legal entity operates under this brand, where Yevgeny Akhmadishin was also the general director.

Created by Akhmadishin in 2016, the manufacturer of sensors "Vaviot" (legal entity "Telematic Solutions") since September 2018, 13% belongs to the general director of the development group of Coalco companies Alexander Kuznetsov, 87% to the American company "Vaviot Integral Systems." On the website of Coalco "Vaviot" is listed among the key projects that the development group is engaged in.

In October 2018, by the phone indicated on the Vaviot website, an employee of the company told TAdviser that Ahmadishin had not worked for them for a long time.

2017

The arrest of Yevgeny Akhmadishin

In November 2017, Yevgeny Akhmadishin was arrested by order of the Basmanny Court of Moscow. The reason for the arrest was the suspicion of fraud under part 4 of article 159 of the Criminal Code, which provides for liability for fraud committed by an organized group or on an especially large scale.

The Basmanny court also arrested the director of development of Absolut LLC Oleg Filippov, suspected of embezzlement of funds allocated for the maintenance and repair of the intelligent transport system of Moscow and the director of the Capital Repair Directorate, Alexander Shukyurov, suspected of fraud. More details here.

Run IoT franchise

On October 25, 2017, Strige, a provider of LPWAN solutions for the Internet of Things, announced the launch of the first IoT franchise in Russia and the CIS. The company announced the provision of access to its own IoT platform for regional organizations. As planned by the company, with the advent of an affordable IoT platform in the regions, a tool will appear for deploying solutions based on LPWAN. More details here.

2016

Creation of a new company - Vaviot

In 2016, as a result of the separation of Stream Telematics, a new company was created - Vaviot LLC. Yevgeny Akhmadishin was appointed general director in it. The company began to engage in activities similar to Strige Telematics - the development of LPWAN solutions and the creation of an LPWAN network.

Vaviot not only develops the LPWAN network, but also produces the sensors themselves - for example, smart water meters connected to the wireless network and transmitting readings through it. Systems for housing and communal services inherited the experience of developing systems for controlling road flow, created by Strige Telematics in 2011.

Decision on the section "Swift-Telematics"

In 2016, Strige Telematics was divided. The reason for this was disagreements over the development strategy between the co-founders of the project Andrei Bakumenko and Yevgeny Akhmadishin, who in total owned 55% of the company, and its general director Andrei Sinitsin.

2015: Business Development

In 2015, partners also began selling meters for electricity. The monthly sale of Strige-Telematics in 2016 was 2000-3000 meters of water and electricity. The check of management companies varies from 500 thousand rubles to several million for a batch of meters. Then customers pay monthly for technical support and use of a personal account on the Page-Telematics website, where you can process the data.

Regional dealers helped them negotiate with management companies, which in 2016 accounted for about 25% of the revenue of Strige-Telematics. About 20% of the revenues were brought by exports - integrators and meter manufacturers resold Strige-Telematics devices to management companies in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Over four years, entrepreneurs have invested about 100 million rubles in the business, including reinvested profits. After that, they began to master new applications of LPWAN technology. For example, banking: several dozen modems were sold to a company specializing in security systems - for installation at ATMs in order to notify about hacks. It is important for retail networks to track dozens of parameters in warehouses and trading rooms for climate control, electricity consumption, etc.

The founders of Strizh Telematics calculated that the Russian housing and communal services as a whole require more than 400 million different meters. They expected that 209-FZ would raise the demand for new sensors, according to which from July 2016, information for calculations of utility bills should be provided only in electronic form.

We love the draft federal law on GIS housing and communal services very much, because when reading it, it sincerely seems to us that it was written under us, "Sinitsin noted.[2]

2014: Putin became interested in the project

In July 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a number of instructions following a meeting with participants in the Internet Entrepreneurship in Russia forum. Among them was an order to the Moscow government to study the proposals of the IIDF to introduce a remote accounting system and systematize data on the consumption of municipal resources. This initiative was supposed to contribute to the implementation of the solutions of "Swift"^[3].

During a conversation at the forum, Vladimir Putin asked Andrei Sinitsin, listening to a short description of the project - why is it needed if meters already exist to take into account resource expenditures?^[4]. To this, Sinitsin replied that in Russia very few utility meters are connected to remote monitoring systems. At best, electric - by wire. The rest are taken manually, which in itself leaves the possibility for error and for providing approximate values. But the main thing is that many meters, for example, almost all water meters, are located inside apartments, and reading data from them is entirely on the conscience of citizens.

2013: Start Sales

Sales of water meters with an LPWAN modem started in the summer of 2013. The assembly of modems Sinitsin and Akhmadishin ordered the Russian manufacturer, whose name was not disclosed. It took several months to finalize the design to get the transmission range to the base station at a distance of 40-50 km.

2010: Start Product Development

The co-founder of Strizh Telematics, which was engaged in the sale of solutions under the Strizh brand before SRT, is a graduate of MIPT Yevgeny Akhmadishin. He worked at KPMG and Deloitte, where he advised technology companies, as well as at the Mint Capital venture capital fund as an investment director. He came up with the idea of ​ ​ distributing sensors that track the movements of objects produced by a large European manufacturer that had not yet established the sale of its devices in Russia. Akhmadishin suggested that sensors can be supplied to take into account the number of cars on roads and parking lots.

Akhmadishin called Andrei Sinitsin, whom he met at KPMG, to partners - at that time he worked at the investment company A1.

The sensors of the European company brought to Russia, according to Akhmadishin, did not meet expectations. In particular, he found a flaw in the method of transmitting data from import meters working on the ZigBee protocol. Having gathered familiar engineers for old relations at MIPT, the former investor director converted the sensor algorithms to work with the new LPWAN protocol.

One of Akhmadishin's main technological partners at that stage was a graduate of MIPT Yuri Birchenko. He later founded Nwave, a company engaged in the development of a cloud platform for inter-machine interaction and IoT devices, with which sensors could exchange data and save battery power.

Akhmadishin and colleagues created their own version of LPWAN. In 2012, partners released prototypes of counters with an LPWAN modem. The solution seemed to them ideal for the housing and communal services sector. As Sinitsin explained earlier, in Russia housing and communal services gives 6-7% of annual GDP, this is a huge industry and a huge field for automation. Potential buyers are management companies that want to remotely collect statistics on water consumption by residents and monitor unauthorized interventions in the operation of devices.

Notes