Making it Work: RedZone looking for a home-grown hit before eyeing up exports

RedZone is focusing on expanding its customer base in Ireland over the next year, after a challenging 2023 for the Meath tech company, which sells occupancy sensors for workplaces, car parks, canteens and more.

Tomás Collins, co-founder, said the company is “laser-focused this year on expanding our client base in Ireland, building on our revenues and reinvesting in our current portfolio of products”.

Collins said there will be a particular focus on its TruCount Pivot product, a mobile occupancy tracker that should be ready to ship overseas this year.

We’re not really interested in who is sitting at a desk, because we don’t take any personal information

RedZone’s best-selling products are its desk-based trackers, which measure the amount of time a desk is being used, and products for measuring occupancy rates of large rooms like canteens. These couple with the company’s software to display aggregate data about how rooms and spaces are being used.

“This isn’t about employee tracking – we’re not really interested in who is sitting at a desk, because we don’t take any personal information,” said Collins. “This is more about allowing business leaders to understand how their sites are being used.

“It’s about making the right business decisions through data. It’s very hard to argue when you have hard data in front of you,” he said, adding that the sensors, unlike cameras, are GDPR-compliant.

With a background in pharmaceuticals, Collins knew that large companies with extensive workforces would need a way to track occupancy levels in many parts of their premises when Covid hit.

That was a turning point for RedZone, which shifted its technology away from large crowd management – it was used for the papal visit in 2018 – to focus on internal data for larger firms.

Since then, it has added several multinational customers like Eli Lilly and Janssen which now make up the bulk of the business. The firm has also worked with DAA, and with the RDS in Dublin for the last eight BT Young Scientist exhibitions.

Incredibly valuable

Enterprise Ireland’s support has been “incredibly valuable,” Collins said, praising the mentoring programme and the value of its high potential start up scheme, of which the firm is a member.

“Even being able to say that you’re a high potential start up with Enterprise Ireland is, for us, a bit of a coup....it kind of gives you an extra bit of gravitas,” he said.

“They have a huge number of highly experienced mentors who give their time, and they cast a really constructively critical eye over your entire business proposition, which we found hugely valuable”.

Collins said that besides more customers in their home market, RedZone is also looking outside Ireland for growth opportunities.

“It’s absolutely a goal. One of our future ambitions is to launch internationally,” he said, outlining a rough timeline that would see it exporting the TruCount Pivot system into the UK market this year, and spreading into European markets in 2025.

He even raised the possibility of combining AI algorithms with their sensor platform to provide predictive capabilities that he said could “underpin significant business decisions.”

But he warned against the possibility of overstretching his team, and said any plans are contingent on future funding. “We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. As a small operation, ideas can be a distraction, but we need to fight the right battles,” he said.

This Making It Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland