Dr Sithamparanathan Sabesan OBE

Dr Sithamparanathan Sabesan OBE
Founder & President

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE is a multi-award winning entrepreneur with over 15 years’ experience in IoT space. Sabesan founded PervasID Ltd, based on his PhD research, into ‘Passive RFID real time sensing system for intelligent infrastructure’ at Cambridge University. Sabesan invented and developed the World’s most accurate passive RFID technology.

As founder and CEO, Sabesan successfully grew PervasID, a Cambridge University spin-out company, from its inception to a global enterprise, providing transformative solutions to healthcare, industrial, security, retail and supply chain and logistics sectors with a complete product suite of the world’s most accurate RFID readers.

Throughout his career, he has become an expert in entrepreneurship, strategic business development and innovation leadership. Sabesan is an authentic leader, able to build, motivate and develop teams to maximise performance and has the interpersonal and communication skills to forge positive relationships with internal and external parties.

Sabesan’s customers include the largest aircraft manufacturers, Stanley Black & Decker, blue chip retailers and NHS hospitals including Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London. Stanley Black & Decker also use the tags to track supplies from their tool cabinets used by aircraft manufacturers. Each cabinet contains over 1,000 tools, and it can result in serious safety incidents if any are left inside an aircraft. It is estimated that Foreign Object Debris (FOD) costs the aviation industry $13 Billion per year in direct and indirect costs, including flight delays, plane changes and fuel inefficiencies.

In healthcare, PervasID solutions are being deployed in NHS hospitals for tracking surgical instruments to enhance decontamination and sterilisation processes and for tracking hospital assets to ensure that mission critical medical devices are available at the right place and time, for robust and efficient care. The need for this level of traceability of medical devices has been particularly evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution is predicted to save £billions for NHS hospitals and will save lives.

Dr Sabesan was awarded the 2011 Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Entrepreneurs Award and the 2011 UK ICT Pioneers of Connected World award for his RFID breakthroughs. Subsequently he was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, and in 2014 was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship. Since then he has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Young Engineer of the Year award, as well as the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence in the early stage of his career and most recently in 2021 has been awarded a Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation as well as Royal Academy of Engineering Silver medal. Sabesan also holds a BEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering at Sheffield University in 2004, where he graduated with the highest performance in his year, and was among the UK’s top 18 science and technology students to be awarded the Sir William Siemens Medal. He is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University and the ERA Foundation. Sabesan has completed management leadership training at the Harvard Business School.

PervasID systems outperform other passive solutions and provide highly cost effective, scalable and easy to install solutions.