Profile
The man who gave 911 a third dimension
When someone calls 911 from the 14th floor of a high-rise, the dispatcher gets latitude and longitude. They know which building. They don't know which floor. That gap - invisible, maddening, sometimes fatal - is exactly what Manlio Allegra has spent over two decades working to close.
As co-founder, President, and CEO of Polaris Wireless, Allegra built a company that does one thing with unusual precision: it tells you not just where a mobile device is, but how high up it is. The OmniLocate platform, Polaris Wireless's flagship product, delivers carrier-grade 3D location across public safety networks, healthcare facilities, hospitality properties, and IoT deployments - proven within 2.8 meters vertically in high-rise buildings. For first responders searching a burning hotel or office tower, 2.8 meters is the difference between the right floor and the wrong one.
"Location services are moving from a flat world to a three-dimensional one, spawning innovation in commercial applications."- Manlio Allegra, GeoBuiz Summit 2020
Allegra arrived at wireless location technology via a career path that very few technologists could draw on a straight line. He holds an MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Milan's Polytechnic Institute - one of Europe's most demanding technical universities - and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, the credential that would define the next phase of his work. Before wireless was a category, he was already operating at the intersection of engineering rigor and global business strategy.
His first significant chapter began in 1984. Allegra co-founded International Development Group (IDG), a firm providing strategic marketing and software publishing services to companies across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. What followed was one of the more striking market-building stories of the late 1980s: as an IDG principal, Allegra engineered Sega Enterprises' entry into the European market, taking their video game sales from under $10 million to over $1 billion between 1986 and 1991. At the same time, he created a Sega software publishing joint venture for North America in 1988. The playbook was simple in theory - understand local markets, build the right distribution architecture, move fast - and extraordinarily difficult in practice.
In 1991, he founded TecMagik Inc., a California-based publisher of video games and computer entertainment software. The company published titles for Sega's 8-bit and 16-bit consoles, including Andre Agassi Tennis. By 1994, TecMagik had reached over $25 million in annual sales. Then the market shifted, the company wound down, and Allegra moved on. He does not appear to dwell on inflection points.
By 1999, Allegra was in Silicon Valley with a different kind of problem to solve. He co-founded Polaris Wireless, inventing the Wireless Location Signatures (WLS) technology that would become the company's core IP. WLS uses software - not new hardware towers or satellites - to deliver highly accurate mobile positioning. That software-only approach was the bet. In 2001, Polaris received its first patent. In 2003, it won its first public safety contract with SunCom. The rest is a 25-year accumulation of field trials, carrier deployments, patent filings, and one very specific technical ambition: make the Z-axis as reliable as latitude and longitude.
FCC rules require wireless carriers to provide vertical location (Z-axis / floor-level) accuracy for E911 calls. When someone calls from a multi-story building, traditional XY coordinates aren't enough - emergency responders need to know the floor. Polaris Wireless's Z-axis technology, proven within 2.8 meters vertically, directly addresses this gap in emergency response capability.
The milestones came methodically. In 2011, Frost & Sullivan recognized Polaris Wireless with a Location-Based Services Enabling Technology Award. In 2012, the company appeared on the Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies list, with revenue up 79% year-over-year and EBITDA growing six-fold. In 2013, Allegra's team demonstrated 3D vertical location capability directly to the FCC - not a press release, a live demonstration to regulators. That same year, Industry Ventures led a $10M Series C financing.
The 3D platform launched commercially in 2019 - the industry's first. In August 2021, Polaris Wireless announced a collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to offer enhanced vertical location for E911 emergency services, combining Polaris Wireless's deep location software experience with Qualcomm's unparalleled position across the mobile device ecosystem. In March 2022, Polaris Wireless signed two commercial E911 Z-axis license agreements with U.S. carriers. By 2025, Frost & Sullivan had come back with another award: the 2025 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Recognition in location determination technologies.
"With our commitment to public safety and saving lives, we are very excited to reach the stage of commercial integration of our Z-axis product. The two license agreements will help save lives in the U.S. Polaris Wireless is already a leader in software-based XY location, and now we have established ourselves as a leader in Z-axis location for a complete 3D location portfolio."- Manlio Allegra, March 2022
Allegra's broader aspiration is not difficult to read from his public statements. OmniLocate is designed to serve wireless operators, law enforcement, government agencies, and commercial location-based application companies. The expansion targets - healthcare, hospitality, IoT, smart cities, 5G networks - are all environments where knowing exactly where a device is in three dimensions changes what's possible. He has described Polaris Wireless as "a global business, primed to serve 3D location worldwide." The company operates from four offices: Santa Clara (U.S. headquarters), Zug, Switzerland (EMEA and international), Bangalore, India (APAC), and Singapore.
What distinguishes Allegra's career arc is not a single brilliant invention but sustained, quiet execution over multiple decades and in multiple industries. He built a video game business. He built a European market for a Japanese company. He built a 3D location company from a standing start in Silicon Valley, secured more than 90 patents, and signed commercial agreements with some of the largest wireless carriers in the U.S. None of those things happened quickly. All of them required a particular kind of patience with difficult technical and commercial problems.
The Qualcomm collaboration crystallized the stakes. When Allegra said that the success of the partnership would be "measured on the impact it has on the lives of the people that the businesses serve," the language was careful and deliberate. Polaris Wireless is a B2B company. Its customers are carriers. Its end users are people who call 911 from buildings. The product only works if every layer of that chain - technology, carrier integration, device compatibility, dispatcher training - holds together. Building that chain is what Allegra has been doing since 1999.