Springfield tech startup raises $300K

Springfield entrepreneur Robb Woolsey has an ambitious goal for his business: to accurately map the roads in all 3,142 U.S. counties by August 2016.

Sprocket LLC, the company he started in August 2013, depends on such accurate GPS mapping.

Doing so completes the foundation for Sprocket’s first product, Rural First GPS tracking software for law enforcement and first responders. Its commercial counterpart, Sprocket Fleet, is designed for home health care agencies to delivery carriers.

As a former salesman and manager of government accounts for Alltel, Sprint and Verizon, Woolsey identified a significant flaw in GPS tracking systems on the market.

“They all start with one of two commercial mapping systems, and they’re not doing anything to correct that mapping,” Woolsey said of Google Maps and Nokia’s Here. “Street names differ from what is on street signs and county (geographic information systems). It’s a big deal to people who need to find where they are going.”

As of February, Sprocket has received $300,000 in seed capital allowing Woolsey to hire four employees to newly created positions. Nearly $200,000 came from Mayhem Development LLC, which earned the startup investment firm 25 percent ownership, and the remainder is from an undisclosed Missouri investor.

Three weeks into the mapping project, the company is ahead of schedule.

“The goal is to get each county down to an average of four hours (to map). Right now, it’s about 10 to 15,” Woolsey said, adding the team has finished 200 counties, including the entire state of Arkansas. “We’re much farther ahead than I expected us to be at this point.”

By midsummer, he estimates Missouri, Kansas and Illinois will be fully mapped and live. Projects in California, Iowa and Oklahoma are underway.

“We felt he had a good market, he had a need that existed that he was trying to fill, and the other thing we look for are owners who are committed to their ideas” Mayhem Development founder and President Jim Carr said, adding his company also provides Sprocket with managerial and back-office guidance as needed.

Woolsey came up with the idea of Rural First after his father discovered Woolsey’s mother unable to breathe at their home near Willard. Despite being only six minutes from the closest EMT station, 45 minutes went by before paramedics arrived.

“Her airway had completely closed up, they couldn’t intubate and she passed away,” Woolsey said. “Now, there’s nothing that says this would have changed the outcome, but of course if it’s your family or you, you want the opportunity for that outcome to be changed.”

Woolsey said first responders in 16 Missouri counties currently are using the product, which starts at $29 per unit per month.

Sprocket pays an annual, undisclosed fee to Google to utilize Google Maps, and then layers over the updated information obtained from available county GIS. For counties without GIS, Sprocket is working on a free app allowing users to geocode their locations, which would help the company complete its mapping.

With Sprocket software, GPS navigation units attached to vehicles then feed their location and activities back to a central location in real time, enabling the dispatcher to see who is closest to a call, which vehicle is available and provide accurate, turn-by-turn directions based on the corrected map. For instance, police dispatchers can identify the closest available patrol car, even down to whether that officer is actively writing a ticket. In that case, the dispatcher could then send the next closest officer.

The machine-to-machine communication relies on data plans through Verizon Wireless’ cellular network, and Woolsey’s company is part of the Verizon Solutions Provider program.

“That’s one thing that we’ve heard from a lot of our customers, they could not find a fleet management or an (automatic vehicle location) solution that was accurate because most of them were using Google Maps,” said Marty Diebold, a Verizon Wireless advanced solutions architect in Springfield. “The biggest benefit is to people running rural routes. I know it doesn’t sound too exciting when you’re talking about a map, but when you’re talking about an ambulance being sent 30 minutes in the wrong direction for an emergency, it becomes a big deal.”

Through the partnership, Sprocket pays a reduced fee based on data usage, typically less than $10 a month per unit, and receives co-marketing services and increased sales through Verizon’s business-to-business representatives.

Within a few weeks, Diebold expects Verizon to activate sales teams to push Sprocket’s products to markets in Springfield, Lake of the Ozarks, Kansas City and St. Louis. “With him being kind of a homegrown solution, we’ve tried to get him into as much opportunity around here as we can,” Diebold said.

Woolsey said the biggest challenge for Sprocket is obtaining maps and data from counties.

“What we run into is even though it’s public information and there are Sunshine Laws on it, they all seem to interpret it their own way. Some of them want to put data agreements on it,” Woolsey said, adding while St. Louis County provided its mapping at no charge, others are not as receptive. “Jackson County wants to charge us $300 per megabyte, which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars for that information.”

Woolsey is seeking another $300,000 to $450,000 in funding by the fourth quarter and he estimates staffing up to 30 employees by year’s end. With income from the product lines and the Verizon Wireless partnership, he forecasts positive cash flow by spring.