Albert Behr is an innovator and leader focused on technology commercialization. Born in Winnipeg, Behr has been in the technology industry for more than three decades. His experience spans high-level marketing, operational, and financing roles across leading technology companies and startups around the globe.

While based in the U.S. and Asia, Behr held executive leadership roles with technology giants such as AT&T, Fujitsu, and Symantec. While in Canada, he served as chief strategy officer for BorderWare Technologies, COO of NRG Group, and senior VP for Platform Computing.

For the past 20 years, Behr has been at the helm of the technology commercialization consultancy he founded, advising more than 1,100 tech companies. During that time, he led numerous large-scale strategic partnerships and funding efforts for some of the most promising IT, clean tech, and material sciences firms in North America and Europe. In early 2017, he began devoting time to speaking engagements around the globe and curriculum development for one of Canada’s top universities, where he is a professor in the faculty of engineering and teaches a course focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology commercialization strategies.

In 2017 Behr was asked to consult with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a highly respected international R&D institute in Germany responsible for introducing disruptive technologies such as MP3 and Sirius XM. While working with Fraunhofer, Behr encountered MIOTY™, a yet to be commercialized wireless data transmission solution that he believes will disrupt the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular markets to address the last mile of connectivity for IoT. MIOTY is the result of a 10-year, €30 million research effort by Fraunhofer.

Unlike Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that have limited range and costly, power-hungry cellular, MIOTY is a LPWAN (low-power wide area network) device that can transmit up to 1.5 million messages per day within a radius of five to 20 km without having to pay carrier fees. With its unrivalled interference immunity and battery life of up to 20 years, it is the ideal solution for large scale IoT deployments in industrial and commercial environments such as manufacturing, oil and gas, mining, and smart buildings.

Seeing the opportunity for MIOTY to capture significant global market share, Behr was awarded the exclusive worldwide licensing rights to commercialize MIOTY under his newly formed company, Behr Technologies Inc. (BTI). The licensing agreement for what is now known as MIOTY by BTI represented a first in Fraunhofer’s 70-year history. 

After signing the licensing agreement on December 20, 2017, Behr funded the venture through private investors in just four weeks. Since then, BTI has forged partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, Hitachi Solutions, Advantech, and several other global OEMs and automotive manufacturers that have yet to be announced. BTI has gained significant interest from the world’s leading industry analysts and in October 2018 was named the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in IIoT Sensor Connectivity by Frost & Sullivan. In the Mobile Breakthrough Awards, BTI was selected as the Overall M2M Solution Provider of Year and Startup of the Year.

With MIOTY as a flagship product, Behr’s mission is to gain global domination for Canada in the field of wireless data transmission. As a commercialization specialist, his plan is to introduce a series of MIOTY-based products and applications every 18 months, with a main focus on automotive, oil and gas, inventory control, manufacturing, warehousing and business applications.