The successful journey of Cloud4Wi, Inc. began when its Co-founders, Andrea Calcagno and David Quadrini understood that brick and mortar businesses were missing a huge opportunity to connect with their customers. Most businesses already had the WiFi infrastructure in place and they could have leveraged it to better understand and engage their customers. At the end, the Co-founders were certain that WiFi could play a significant role in transforming the customer experience. Owing to this, Cloud4Wi was incepted in 2014, offering a suite of enterprise guest WiFi, location analytics and location-based marketing products. This product suite provides brick and mortar businesses with accurate insights into customers’ in-store behavior, along with powerful, location-based marketing tools to engage them in meaningful ways such as helping in drive on-site revenues, which was not possible before.
Top global brands already rely on Cloud4Wi. They include ABSA, Adecco, Bulgari, Burger King, Carmila, Gruppo FS Italiane, HFE, Illy, McDonald’s, Prada Group, Olive Garden, and VTB24. To date, Cloud4Wi’s product suite connects more than 100 million mobile users across 30,000 locations in more than 100 countries, while collecting more than 7.5 billion of location data per month. Cloud4Wi is based in San Francisco, and has offices in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Pisa, Bologna, and Bangkok.
Multitalented & Goal-Oriented Leader
Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Cloud4Wi, Andrea Calcagno, has a background in marketing, technology, and economics, with experience in the media-telco industry with a focus on next-generation networks and services. Calcagno holds a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Pisa. He has led more than 50 projects in this space, and has written many articles and reports about advanced wireless technologies. Calcagno began his career at Telecom Italia Labs in Turin, where he performed advanced research and development activities on mobile access networks, receiving international patents on mobile broadband architectures.
Calcagno has also played key roles in several innovative Italian start-ups. In 2003, he founded and served as CEO and EVP of WiTech, working closely with Quadrini in Telecom Italia. Telecom Italia had a handful of customers that wanted to implement an easy yet advanced guest Wi-Fi solution, and Telecom Italia saw this opportunity as a new way to enjoy a new stream of revenue. They turned to WiTech to fulfill the request of keeping customers happy. After extensive research, WiTech realized that nothing existed on the market that could satisfy the demands of Telecom Italia, so they decided to build a solution themselves.
In 2014, Calcagno and Quadrini raised Series A funding with United Ventures, a European venture capital company, which helped them to develop a powerful and robust guest Wi-Fi platform. In October 2017, Cloud4Wi closed an $11.5 million Series B financing round, bringing the total investment in the company to $15.5 million. The round was co-led by Opus Capital and United Ventures, Gill Cogan, a general partner of Opus Capital, is one of Cloud4Wi’s Board of Directors. With this new funding, Cloud4Wi will invest in product development, boost its sales and marketing efforts, further develop its global channel partner network, and expand its machine learning expertise.
Powerful & Influencing Technologies
Cloud4Wi offers an AI-driven product suite for location analytics and marketing services. With Cloud4Wi, businesses can collect customer insights through its guest WiFi services or its mobile loyalty app and predict behavior patterns. Empowered with this in-depth knowledge of who customers are and how they behave, businesses in turn can reach their target customers individually and in real-time via text messages, emails or push notifications. Cloud4Wi also offers a smart WiFi and BLE sensor to achieve high-level location analytics. The sensor is plug-and-play and can be installed in selected locations to gather more data, with a minimal impact on IT infrastructure and operations.
Building A Dream Team
The Co-founders believe that the most valuable employees are the ones who are proactive. Because proactive people do not sit around waiting for answers to appear; rather they stand up, put one foot in front of the other, and find the answers on their own. They do not wait for someone to hand them an instruction manual and a box of tools; they are resourceful.
Forthcoming Challenges
One of the biggest challenges in today’s technologically driven industry is the cut throat competition. Cloud4Wi is trying to stay ahead of the game by offering cutting-edge technologies and, at the same time, working with its customers to boost their success. The leading service provider company is proud that world renowned companies such as Prada has selected Cloud4Wi to transform their in-store customer experience. This ultimately speaks about the excellent services and products offered by Cloud4Wi designed for its elite clientele base.
Awards & Accolades
Cloud4Wi has been bestowed with numerous awards mentioned as follows.
- ‘Cool Vendors in Location Services and Applications’ reported by Gartner.
- In 2017, Cloud4Wi was identified as a representative vendor in the Gartner ‘Market Guide for Indoor Location Application Platforms’ report.
- Mentioned in the Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure’report.
