FreeS Fund Angel-Round Portfolio Company Kolmostar Closes $10 Million Series A | FreeS Fund Financing News
Provides positioning capabilities for IoT devices, mobile devices, and autonomous vehicles.
From the Investor
Li Feng, Founding Partner, FreeS Fund
Email: feng@freesvc.com
Both of Kolmostar's co-founders have unusual backgrounds. Its chief inventor, Vincent Hua, was among the earliest Chinese researchers to join Stanford's LIGO gravitational-wave detector signal-processing project. Through that work, he delved deeply into signal processing, noise cancellation, and methods for pushing the limits of signal-to-noise ratio — a pursuit that drew on mathematics, physics, mechanical engineering, and electronics. That kind of training is extraordinarily rare and brutally demanding, largely because the hardest problem in building a gravitational-wave detector is extracting an incredibly faint signal from overwhelming noise.
Later, Vincent honed his engineering skills at Google and Apple, constantly thinking through where GPS and other emerging technologies were headed and how to break new ground. The combination of these two chapters — fundamental science and top-tier engineering — became the technological foundation of Kolmostar.
Through FreeS Fund's introduction, Vincent met Tong Tao, who was then our EIR. EIR is an internal program we run for people who want to start companies: we invite them to look at deals with us, in other words, to study entrepreneurship through an investor's lens. When we first discussed Vincent's project internally, there was considerable disagreement. It happened that Tong had founded electronics and chip-related startups in Silicon Valley and knew something about GPS technology and its applications, so we asked him to take the lead. Amid the debate, Tong formed an independent judgment, worked closely with Vincent on deep research, and produced a report. That unusual experience brought the two together. Tong chose to join Kolmostar as a co-founder, and FreeS Fund invested in the company's angel round.
Since teaming up, Kolmostar has grown to the point where it has dispelled the skepticism of the time — the question of "can they actually build it?" More precisely, they not only built it, but achieved solid application and commercial traction. What's more, the two-order-of-magnitude improvements in power consumption or precision that they described early on have now been realized. This fully demonstrates their capabilities in technology, engineering, and business. I hope this new round of funding will help them bring their breakthrough technology to more applications, solving forward-looking positioning needs for new sensors and beyond.
Kolmostar Closes $10 Million Series A
Source: Kolmostar
Kolmostar recently completed a $10 million Series A round led by ABI Capital, with participation from FreeS Fund, Eastern Bell Capital, Star VC, and Tsinghua Holdings Capital.
Kolmostar is dedicated to providing low-power, centimeter-level precision GNSS (GPS, BeiDou, etc.) positioning for billions of mobile devices. For phones, wearables, and other mobile devices, Kolmostar reduces traditional GPS sensor power consumption by 100x. For autonomous driving and other industrial applications, it delivers centimeter-level precision in dense urban environments with tall buildings.
High-Precision Positioning Becomes an Industry Hard Requirement
Kolmostar Achieves Centimeter-Level Accuracy Through Data + Computation
GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System, including GPS, etc.) positioning, simply put, works by measuring electromagnetic wave flight time to calculate distance and determine position. In open environments, standard GPS currently achieves 3–10 meter accuracy, while high-precision RTK GPS can reach sub-meter or centimeter-level positioning. But dense urban buildings block and reflect signals, creating multipath interference and other problems. Today, even high-precision RTK GPS units costing thousands of dollars often degrade to several meters or even tens of meters of accuracy in complex city environments — far short of what emerging industries like autonomous driving require.
Drawing on insights from the team's work on the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detector signal-processing project, combined with decades of engineering experience, Kolmostar uses high-dimensional statistical theory to process GNSS signals and eliminate multipath interference and other distortions caused by buildings, providing stable, reliable centimeter-level precision in challenging urban settings.
The Low-Power Trend Is Irreversible
Kolmostar's R&D Leadership Ensures "Always On"
In daily life, many people have experienced how quickly phones and smartwatches drain battery once GPS is turned on. Traditional GPS modules are power-hungry, making them the most battery-intensive sensor in mobile devices. When running, for example, a sports watch burns through most of its energy on GPS for positioning and pace measurement. To extend device battery life, GPS often can't stay on continuously, severely limiting the granularity of location data generated and undermining its commercial value. Whether in smart hardware, smart cities, or logistics, the requirement for terminals is "location always online" — sensors need lower power consumption to ensure long endurance. Reducing device power further is an unavoidable challenge for industrial digitalization and intelligent upgrading, and an irreversible trend.
Leveraging its strong research capabilities in information theory and signal processing, the Kolmostar team can achieve positioning while collecting the minimum possible satellite signal duration, preserving the same accuracy. Its required signal acquisition time is just 1/100th that of traditional GPS, representing an order-of-magnitude breakthrough in GPS sensor power consumption.
Elite Team Expanding Aggressively
Openings in Both China and the US
Kolmostar maintains R&D centers in Beijing and Silicon Valley.
On the team side: Co-founder Tong Tao earned his bachelor's degree in electronics from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Harvard University, where he worked on the ultra-low-power computing system for Robo-Bee, the world's smallest flying robot. Before founding Kolmostar, he was a founding member of Lion Semiconductor Inc., where he helped design the industry's first fully integrated single-chip power management unit — a product now found in the world's top three smartphone brands. Co-founder Vincent Hua holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University and worked on the signal-processing system for the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. During his decade-plus in Silicon Valley, he served as a research scientist and systems architect at Google and Apple. Other team members come from leading companies and universities including Google, Apple, CEC, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Tsinghua, and Peking University.
This round of funding will primarily go toward team building and product commercialization, including expanding R&D teams in China and the US and launching GNSS positioning solutions tailored to different industries and applications.
The team is actively hiring for multiple positions in Beijing and Silicon Valley:
- Software Engineer
- Algorithm Engineer
- Statistical Signal Processing Scientist
- Applied Mathematician
- Embedded Systems Engineer
For more details, visit the company website: www.kolmostar.com/careers
Send resumes directly to dreams@kolmostar.com, or scan the QR code below to apply!
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