Grace Ashiru
CATI, an Internet of Things (IoT) start-up based in Cape Town, has built game-changing intelligent technologies while state-owned institutions and enterprises in South Africa are spending billions of Rands to combat the infrastructure vandalism that has plagued the country.
CATI, a subsidiary of the incubation company Future Perfect Corporation, claims that its solutions can help protect the country’s essential infrastructure.CATI, formerly known as Radian Technologies, is one of 10 start-up companies that completed e–Track at the UCT GSB’s Solution Space last year and graduated. In the past, it has also been awarded funding under Amazon’s AWS Activate Founders start-up program. According to Dr. Stephen Jones, who serves as the chief scientific officer of CATI, “We hope that occurrences like power interruptions due to vandalism will be a thing of the past.”His comments come in the wake of random outages of electricity across South Africa, frequently brought on by vandalism.
The electrical grid, the telecommunications networks, and the rail networks are frequently the targets of attacks. Johannesburg City Power announced a non-technical revenue loss of R2 billion for the 2019/2020 fiscal year.
Prasa estimates that this number will amount to R1 billion between 2018 and 2021. Telkom, Eskom, and Prasa estimated that vandalism and theft cost them R7 billion yearly, with a total loss to the economy of R187 billion yearly.
In an interview with Ventureburn, the chief executive officer of CATI, Alvin Rajoo, said the following: “Our company was developed out of necessity.” We decided to employ technological means of defense.
The fledgling start-up’s in-house assault alarm system can identify attempted acts of vandalism. The authorities are informed of the precise location of the attack thanks to a mix of intelligence on the edge and the capacity of cloud computing.
In the industrial neighborhood of Durbanville in Cape Town, CATI was able to begin and complete a successful pilot project. This was done in partnership with Eskom, local business owners, and a security firm to regularly monitor electricity distribution kiosks that are vandalized.
Rajoo confirms that the company plans to put its flagship Infrastructure Attack Monitor (IAM), power backup, and IoT dashboard in places where there is a lot of vandalism to keep an eye on infrastructure.
This could make it less likely for essential services like power, water, and the phone network to go down. The CATI IAM can also be installed on water pump stations, telecommunications masts, ole power substations, and towers.
