Cloud and Edge Computing needs an overhaul

Cloud Computing has been around for a while and its momentum is not stopping anytime soon. It has made computing ubiquitous, allowing anyone to access unlimited amounts of storage wherever there is an internet connection. With the boom of machine generated data, AI acceleration and low latency edge computing, the Cloud is now also utilized to provide scale for computing power.

However, there are colossal challenges ahead. To date, our computers have been built as stand-alone units and their ability to coordinate with each other to accelerate computing workloads has been designed with layers and layers of middleware and redundant software that have made a huge legacy burden.

A powerful technology already proven at scale

Hadean is building a cloud-first OS for real-time distributed computing that is orders of magnitude more reliable and scalable than anything available today. Hadean’s goal is to remove the layers of redundant software and offer a robust new foundation for large-scale distributed computing.

Servers using Hadean will all work as one large-scale supercomputer, meaning that anyone using a computer that is part of the Hadean network will have access to the combined computing power of every single server within that network. Developers will be able to accelerate their workload “on-demand” with a guarantee of predictability and security.

While Hadean is a ‘Deep Tech’ play and requires a longer-term approach towards commercialization, the team has made remarkable progress in the short term by focusing on gaming, where the performance they offer matters today. They have successfully deployed application libraries for real-world customers and have recently announced partnerships with Microsoft Azure, that now power Hadean’s Aether Engine, and with CCP, the studio that created EVE Online, for EVE: Aether Wars, a real-time 10 000 player deathmatch demo that will explore opportunities for large-scale multiplayer simulation in CCP’s current and future games.

Beyond gaming, the company also has traction with customers such as the Francis Crick Institute for genomics, and develops products for other verticals including finance, AR/VR and industrial simulation.

An outstanding team combining tech expertise and go-to-market drive

Last but not least, we were genuinely impressed by the team and their customer-first approach, which is incredibly valuable for DeepTech start-ups. Rashid and Craig form the perfect tandem of founders, a young and outstanding computer scientist with a great vision working alongside a world-class CEO that has been able to bridge Tech and Business as soon as he joined the company.

We have seen countless companies in DeepTech trying to launch ambitious projects. The UK and Europe are not lacking strong tech. However, we have chosen to support Hadean thanks to their go-to-market approach and the focus that they have on delivering real impact for their customers.

We believe Hadean will transform the way computers empower humans by virtually giving everyone a supercomputer. However, challenges ahead are many. The company needs to deliver their technology roadmap and ship products to their customers in a rapidly changing field, but this is where we believe we can help. Combining our Business Hub with our entrepreneurial experiences, we will support Hadean in generating and signing commercial opportunities within our sectors, while also assisting their team scale in a fast and sustainable manner.

Hadean wants to turn the cloud into a single giant supercomputer.

Hadean is redesigning the technology stack from first principles for the cloud to enable developers to scale their code for applications that require vast computing power.

HadeanOS enables programmers to scale their code, as it treats entire cloud data centres as a single gigantic computer. Its goal is to ultimately rid companies of the need for DevOps, which it claims is already a huge function among tech teams today.

From games to life

One application for Hadean’s cloud simulation engine is massive multiplayer online games. CCP Games, the creator of the hugely influential Eve Online, announced yesterday (6 March) that it is working with Hadean to break the record number of players in one battle at a time.

Meanwhile, the Francis Crick Institute is using Hadean’s platform to build complex models of protein-protein interactions to help research diseases such as cancer.

In early January, I got the chance to attend CES Las Vegas for the very first time. I joined the VC Aster only a few months ago after several years in consulting, and this was an amazing opportunity to get my hands dirty at the world’s hottest tech innovation event.

As you can expect, everything there was huge, there were a tremendous number of startups to meet, events to attend, conferences to join, corporate booths to visit… And funny enough, I felt like large companies have switched places with startups. If you wanted to be inspired and get a taste of what the world could look like in the distant future, then the corporate halls were the place to be. During CES, corporates deploy significant efforts to prove they are innovation leaders in their fields, sometimes at the expense of common sense. On the other hand, startups have a more pragmatic approach (at least the ones I met with). They need to reach markets in the next few years to survive so they are working on more medium-term innovations. Reconciling both parties around common interests is the biggest challenge of all!

As mobility is one of Aster’s core focuses and was heavily show-cased at CES, I spent a lot of time in the LVCC North Hall, which was dedicated to vehicle technology. After driving into the future, I decided to walk back to the startup world at Eureka Park, and I took the chance to wonder: in the era of autonomous driving, what will be the new relationship between riders and their cars? How will new mobility use cases be enabled by 5G? How can cities prepare today for what is coming tomorrow?

The travel experience will change drastically, but a car will stay a car

Two major trends impressed me regarding the travel experience: the “tailored travel experience” and the “augmented travel experience”.

Many car manufacturers and OEMs (Faurecia, Valeo, Honda, Kia) are working on the “tailored travel experience”: when riders enter a car, their physiological and psychological states are assessed (cardiac frequency, skin temperature, clothes, mood/expression, sweat, etc.). The travel experience is customized to best fit this state: light, temperature, sounds/music, odors, itinerary, seat tilt, etc. OEMs and car manufacturers study the human body to better design car parts in order to meet the highest level of comfort. Faurecia is working with ESP Consulting on this topic. This trend started to appear at CES last year but now everyone is working on it.

Regarding the “tailored travel experience”, it seems technology has passed the stage where it was merely relieving people of hard and troublesome chores or providing tools to help/accelerate a decision process. Now technology aims to take the decision in place of people, completely removing the need for a human action. The main goal is to make people “happy and comfortable” … and helpless some might say. This reminded me of a scene at the beginning of Wall-E movie.

A few players explored more precise use cases to offer an “augmented travel experience”. For example, Nissan goes further than just displaying basic navigation information on the car windshield. They are working on a 3D interface connecting the real and the virtual world, i.e., the new windshield, called “invisible to visible”. Using data collected from previous drives, the screen can adapt and change to a sunny blue sky if the weather is cloudy/foggy and rainy to increase visibility. On difficult roads (eg mountains) where the driver takes control, it also gives augmented content like a virtual car ahead, allowing the driver to anticipate the right path to take. If needed, a human assistant can also be projected on the seat next to the driver. This also finds applications in driving lessons. Finally, to find a parking spot, the driver can see through whole buildings and check streets nearby.

Another example came from the Valeo R&D department, which is working on the “augmented phone call experience”. In that case, the “driver” can see the interlocutor as a hologram seated in the back of the car (and hear him as if the voice came from the back of the car). On the other side, the interlocutor can wear VR glasses to talk as if he was indeed on the back seat. Value proposition is quite unclear at that stage, but CES is all about demonstrating new stuff!

All these innovations easily make us forget one thing… even though vehicle software evolves incrementally each year, the vehicle hardware (shape and bodywork at least) in itself does not change so much. Basically, it is still a box on 4 wheels. And yet, there surely is a lot to do to improve maneuverability, parking, traffic, etc. Hyundai is the only one to imagine a “walking car”, which can activate robotic legs to walk at 5km/h over rough terrain and a variety of obstacles. It might be outlandish and unbuildable, but at least Hyundai is thinking “beyond the range of wheels”. Not to mention all flying vehicles, with Bell’s hydrid-electric flying taxi, available via Uber by the mid-2020s. I choose to sort them into “small personal aircrafts” rather than “flying cars”.

In a short-term view, a lot has yet to be done to turn regular cars into connected cars, starting with a new telecom network made available for all vehicles. All vehicles presented at CES 2019 seemed to be connected and autonomous by default! A gap needs to be bridged by all players of the mobility ecosystem.

5G is not far away from enabling connected cars and autonomous driving

Even beyond use cases in mobility, 5G was a major theme at CES 2019, advertised both during the CES conference launch and throughout the whole show on the center stage. Verizon, the first US telco operator involved in 5G, spoke in many conferences and for them, words were not enough to describe the tremendous opportunity of 5G: “the next generation wireless network will be a quantumly wireless and speed connectivity for users”, “ 5G will only be limited by our imagination”, etc. 5G will indeed bring a high speed (until 20 Gbit versus maximum 1 Gbit for 4G and Wifi), high density (1m connected devices /km2 versus 2000/km² for 4G), high security and reliability, low latency (1ms versus at least 100ms for 4G) and low power (10% of current consumption) connectivity to many use cases, including some that are not currently using wireless connectivity.

As a matter of fact, connected cars will be among the first use cases for 5G. For instance, better connectivity on board (in cars, trains, subway, etc.) will enable enhanced infotainment (being able to download a movie in a moving car in a few seconds), parking and navigation services. Augmented and virtual reality applications will be infinite, and players are only beginning to explore the possibilities in the mobility area. Traffic management and safety will be improved, with better communication between vehicles and infrastructure. Verizon reminded that the lag time of the human eye is 150ms to see an obstacle, whereas the information would be transmitted in 1ms with 5G — for a car running at 100km/h, it means a distance of 1.5m VS 2.5cm.

A bit later down the road, 5G will enable autonomous driving, allowing more people to have access to mobility services: people who don’t like driving, the disabled and the elderly, etc. Non-driving tasks will be covered as well: hailing a self-driving taxi, monitoring a self-driving fleet, supporting riders through their journey. The first autonomous vehicles such as Waymo’s did not wait for 5G and are already on the road, for training and educating purposes. Indeed, explaining autonomous driving to the wider public will help legislators pass new bills.

However, in the short-term, first usage scenarios for 5G need to be targeted in a local approach in order to avoid waiting for a broad deployment. For example, a 5G enabled parking garage, a 5G enabled campus, with autonomous vehicle onsite only, or a 5G travelling corridor, alongside highways or subway routes. 2019 will see the first outcomes but 5G will still take years of worldwide effort to come into full effect.

Indeed, 5G is coming for the autonomous vehicle, but several challenges remain: the whole ecosystem is still waiting for frequency bands to be allocated, not just in the US but across the world. The right algorithms need to be developed and tested for different scenarios. Technological and regulatory challenges remain to densify networks and not allow dead notes (higher frequency means less coverage). Last but not least, investment from public authorities is necessary to upgrade the city infrastructure.

Still, a lot has yet to be done to prepare cities for new mobility solutions

Having a limited knowledge of what the mobility landscape will look like, cities are worried about the investment and regulatory decisions they may need to make for the 10 years to come. As a matter of fact, there are critical and pressing issues, since autonomous driving is already reaching the road. For example, Waymo autonomous ride-hailing services was launched in December 2018, but only as a demonstration since public authorities don’t have the policy framework for this yet.

The mayor of Baltimore took part in a panel discussion at the conference called “What’s next for transportation in the Smart City?”. She repeatedly asked about how to prepare Baltimore for autonomous vehicles and how to ensure access to public transportation for all citizens, regardless of their age, social status and neighborhood (what about narrow streets? Historical centers?). Her current challenges are the following: building bike lanes in the city (impact on elderly, street access for emergency services, regulation regarding helmet usage, other vehicle access to the bike lanes such as scooters, wheelchairs, etc.), electrifying public transport (impact on the grid), ensuring safety of the citizens without invading people’s lives (every vehicle could be a surveillance camera), and upgrading city infrastructure (including decaying roads) to install new technologies. These challenges all seem quite basic compared to the future of mobility showcased at CES. The need to upgrade our cities was far less in the spotlight than the need to have a stress-free and decision-free travel experience… And yet, these are real issues that will significantly slow down the deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles. Thankfully, some companies address part of the problem, such as the French startup Citymagine, which provides an automated infrastructure inspection in order to secure infrastructures and speed up the arrival of autonomous vehicles in our cities.

At Aster, we are keen on funding companies that will transform the travel experience and enable connected and autonomous driving. That is why we recently invested in Wluper, which is developing a conversational AI to provide navigational intelligence to mobility service providers. However, upgrading cities in a sustainable way, while simultaneously keeping economic, social and environmental challenges in mind is another one of our priorities.

Aster is thrilled to kick off – alongside the European VC Speedinvest – a new series of events gathering startups, VCs and corporates to discuss topics around Industry 4.0.

For the first edition, on December 11 2018, at Speedinvest’s rooftop location in Munich, we had an exciting evening of debates and panel discussions around Predictive Analytics.

To watch the replay:

The Venture Capital industry is constantly looking for the latest most interesting topics, sometimes making startups look like fashion trends. And like any fashion trend, the reality is different from what we see. Today, startup success seems to be measured by its growth rate and inflated valuation. This is now the norm but to many, including entrepreneurs and investors, the logic doesn’t look always add up.

Venture Capital investors are definitely adding to this frenzy. In fact, the way VCs invest varies tremendously across the industry but there is one question that all of them will ask entrepreneurs pitching for funding: “How do you scale?”

Staying small is perfectly fine

First, it is important to mention that growth is primarily a matter of choice for many business owners. In fact, running a small, profitable business with or without growth ambition is not just perfectly fine, it is also fundamental. SMEs represent the vast majority of our economy and are absolutely critical to the economic fabric of our countries.

Without dismissing their importance, however, VC’s focus is on companies with high growth potential. This is set by the inherent high risk of startup investing. VCs are unicorn hunters. These are rare but are the only ones that will guarantee the positive return of their funds. From Series A onward, VCs are only focused on companies with scaling and growth potential, or in other words, rockets on their launching pads ready to take off.

For entrepreneurs who have a profitable business, it is most often a question of personal choice or ambition to go for high growth. Sometimes, it is more a matter of timing and competition.

Is “scaling” the same as “growing”?

So, scaling is critical to VCs but interestingly, not many entrepreneurs address this aspect in a convincing manner when pitching. Even more interesting, not many VCs can explain what they mean by “scale” in simple terms.

Adding to the confusion, “scaling” is commonly used in the same way as “growing”, although these are two different concepts. One can say “scale or grow revenue”, “scale or grow a business”, but investors always ask “how do you scale?”, never “how do you grow?”. This means there must be a difference!

Indeed, scaling is about increasing revenue generated by one unit of resource, or simply put, doing more with less. It is about making the business more efficient and improving its unit economics over time. It means constantly aligning the rocket to go faster by following the optimum trajectory. Examples of high-level metrics that are signs of scaling companies are: increase in recurring revenue, lead velocity rate or decrease of cost of sales.

Growing, instead, is about acquiring and allocating resources. It is about raising funding and using the funds to recruit sales people or expanding to other geographies. It means adding more fuel to the rocket for it to go farther. The main high-level metrics showing growth are revenue increase, pace of past fundraising rounds or headcounts.

Now that those definitions are set, one can already make one first remark. Nowadays, companies showing high growth are plenty whereas those showing good scaling remain scarce.

Both concepts are obviously linked but they can work together or against each other. Some companies can scale without growing in size, increasing their revenue through means such as automation, digitalization of processes without going into a hiring spree.

The contrary is very common too. Companies can grow without scaling, and the symptoms are quite easily recognizable.

Bigger doesn’t mean better

At a later funding stage, companies usually use multi-million funding rounds to grow, expand or conquer new markets and countries. With a war chest in the bank, many of those soon-to-be unicorns are tempted by a “growth-first” strategy in order to preempt market shares. This is also often encouraged by their own investors. The consequence of this strategy is that it does not address scaling, which can lead to big pain points that might backfire down the line if the growth is not sustainable.

Early symptoms of growing companies that are not scaling are quite easy to identify. Here are a few examples below, bearing in mind that this is happening at the same time as high revenue growth rate:

• Cost of sales increasing/decreasing margin
• Quality management getting out of control
• Worsening of customer satisfaction
• More and more fragmented company culture, often occurring during international expansion
• Lack of communication within the team or management team losing sight of what is happening.

The consequences can be deadly if the causes of the symptoms are not treated or contained early on:

• Uncontrolled losses in the company, in specific markets or globally
• Demotivated team, and ultimately, key people leaving and high turnover.

If those pain points materialize and scale faster than the business itself, the survival of the startups is down to investors’ confidence, which is in any case putting founders in a pretty uncomfortable position.

So, in the end, what are VCs looking for?

The theoretical answer is quite obvious. VCs are looking for both scale and growth. The reason is extremely simple. Although growth is what drives the exit valuation, companies with a scalable model will progress faster and with less pain (always good to take!) as soon as funds are invested. The reality is obviously less straightforward, and some VCs can prioritize growth for several reasons.

First, no company has nice and shiny metrics from day one, these are built over time through trials and errors. Also, each step in the life of the company brings new challenges that can disrupt those metrics. In early stages, investors evaluate the potential of scalability, which may never materialize but as long as there is growth, founders keep the chance to convince more investors.

Second, there are actually many examples of companies that adopted a “growth-first” strategy and who still managed to exit. In fact, some of the largest IPOs in history were companies who only figured out how to scale after going public. Such exits remain however dependent of market conditions and the confidence of investors on the public market remains much more volatile than on the private one.

Therefore, generally, we will always prefer companies who have built scalability in their model. During high growth phases, we will also recommend and assist founders to prioritize “scaling” over a “growth-only” strategy. We believe this statement should be obvious to founders: if your company struggles to scale, growth will only spark fires that you have to deal with down the line.

Finalcad, a leading construction mobile platform, today announces a $40 million Series C round, led by Draper Esprit, accompanied by Cathay Innovation and with the support of Salesforce Ventures.

The investment will enable the company to significantly accelerate operations across Europe and Asia, as the demand for their mobile-first construction app keeps increasing.

• The round was led by Draper Esprit, along with Cathay Innovation and additional funding from Salesforce Ventures. Finalcad has now raised a total of $63M. The company will use the further funds to expand its operations across Europe and Asia.

Along with existing French investors Serena, Aster and CapHorn Invest, additional international investment funds are joining Finalcad. Newcomer investors include leading European fund Draper Esprit, the global VC fund Cathay Innovation, and the global investment group of Salesforce, global CRM leader, Salesforce Ventures.

$10 trillion is currently spent on construction worldwide, and this number expected to double over the next 20 years. Yet the industry suffers from chronic low productivity. According to McKinsey, while overall productivity has risen by 30% since 1995 in the UK and Germany, productivity in the construction industry has risen by only 7%. Simultaneously, the adoption of digital technology has been very low; the industry still predominantly uses manual, non-digital processes. With a rise in population, and the consequent need for more infrastructure and housing worldwide, the need to build in more efficient and cost-effective ways could not be more pressing.

Finalcad was founded in 2012 by Jimmy Louchart, Joffroy Louchart and David Vauthrin, to solve this exact problem. The company enables construction companies to improve their operational efficiency through a mobile digital platform. Site Engineers, Foremen, Architects and Consultants can work together via their app, enabling collaboration across a wide variety of workflow processes both on site and at the office. Their app is not just a communication tool, but also enables users to work on drawings, BIM models, tasks, controls, safety procedures and progress monitoring. Finalcad can then provide insights and best practices at a company level, thanks to their analytics technology.

With this additional firepower, Finalcad is well positioned to build on its progress across Europe and Asia, as they execute on their mission to digitise the construction industry. The new funds will enable the company to:

• Extend their SaaS Product platform from the Buildings and Infrastructure industry sectors, to Energy and Operations & Maintenance
• Hire 100 people to better serve their global customers
• Invest in R&D around Construction Insight Platform, to provide predictive insights

The company now employs 170 people, across 12 countries and has serviced over 20,000 projects since inception. Their customers include leading construction firms such as Shimizu, Eiffage, RATP and PT PP.

VC-investing is a really particular job: most young companies out there do not need VC-money, and most companies invested with VC-money will fail. Yet, the right association between rocket-fuelled entrepreneurs and supportive investors will move mountains and reshape entire markets for good. This quest for outliers drives a VC-investor’s motivation on a daily basis, and has strong implications on its daily organization. Here’s what I have learned 1 year into the job!

First, let me introduce Aster: we are a 15+ year old Paris-based VC firm investing across Europe, the US and Israel in Seed and Series A. Our DNA is all about finding market leaders in the Mobility and Industry verticals; and helping them create business opportunities through our network of large corporate and SMEs.

I joined the team almost a year ago, which gave me the time to:

• Exchange with more than 200 entrepreneurs
• Help my colleagues on a hundred of other investment opportunities
• Deep-dive (sometimes unfriendly) markets such as Hyperconverged Infrastructures, Hydrogen for mobility, DevOps automation, Flight ticket distribution and Urban Logistics
• Map the whole UK incubator/accelerator/VC ecosystem

In the meantime, I also:

• Spent too much time studying some investment opportunities that we ended up dropping for basic reasons
• Missed some opportunities because of bad timing
• Lost myself into studying some market’s underlying structures and dynamics

From this, it may be the right moment to take a step back & give some of the first insights!

1. What is VC about?

Endless possibilities, limited time

The first thing I learnt during this VC-journey, is that time efficiency should be the absolute priority on a daily basis.

Firstly, because there are thousands of companies that may fit our investment scope out there, hundreds of events to attend each month and an infinite number of resources (reports, research papers, articles) available.

On top of that, the investment process itself is time-constraining: the best deals can be closed in the blink of an eye and entrepreneurs often have limited time to achieve their fundraising process.

And I am not even talking about supporting portfolio companies, which does not affect junior VC-investors; but this becomes the absolute priority of an investor after several years.

Asymmetry of information is everywhere

On average and if everything goes well, there are 5–10 weeks between the first meeting with a startup and the issue of a termsheet. This period is crucial for both the entrepreneur and the investor:

• For the entrepreneur, it is about “selling” his vision (1st) and his company achievements (2nd) to potential future investor(s), and to convince the most meaningful ones to go on board
• For the investor, it is about building trust on a startup’s potential to create and hold long-term value on a market
• For both, the objective is to align interests and lay the foundations of a future partnership

Unlike in poker, bluffing shouldn’t be an option, neither for the investor nor for the entrepreneur

A year in the job, this is what fascinates me the most about VC: it is really complex to evaluate the potential of a young company that is, by essence, a work in progress, without any cognitive biases. To make it simpler:

• It is not because you would (or wouldn’t) use a product/service that it will (or won’t) succeed
• It is not because you begin to get impressed by a founding team that the investment is worth it
• At the same time, our job is not (only) about evaluating metrics and financials; assessing the human potential of a team is one of the key elements we look at

This list could be long, but in the end it comes to reducing the asymmetry of information to an acceptable level and to acquire solid convictions about a potential to create value on the long run.

2. Are there any cheat codes?

Spend time meaningfully

VC-investing is about cutting through possibilities to find, understand and invest in the most promising companies out there. Doing so requires setting up time-allocation methods and choices; in order to ultimately spend 90% of your time with the 1% outliers you want to invest in.

I’ve discussed this topic with several VCs: Some of them spend hours reading about markets and discussing with experts, because they think deep-understanding of a trend is the most important thing to do. Others spend most of their time with people (founders, teams and future employees), because they think VC is only about people.

Of course, there is no secret sauce and both types are right. The one question an investor should constantly ask himself is: “How can I find the most promising startups out there; and bring the most value to them once I’ve invested?”

Acquire insights and thrive in contradiction

To end up with a more actionable feedback I’d say that at a junior level, practice makes perfect. The best way to build independent convictions is to confront your beliefs with opinionated people, should they be entrepreneurs, industry leaders or other VCs as often as you can.

I usually spend 5–10h/week diving into specific markets, either by reading or discussing with industry professionals. This is even more crucial at Aster, as we are mainly dealing with technical topics such as industrial automation, satellite networks or cybersecurity.

But in the end, being able to say “I don’t know” and to hunt for clarity will always be as important as building market expertise. Asking questions and truly understand their answers is key to avoid superficial reasoning and build meaningful relationships.

Conversational Assistants are at a crossroad

We are definitely in a booming market. Starting with home assistants, Alexa has been leading the charge with a new way to interact with machines using our voice, with other Tech Giants (both Americans and Chinese) also extremely active. The promise is ambitious: this will allow humans to talk to computers the same way we talk to other humans, removing a lot of the friction that is linked to using a mouse, a search bar or a keyboard. And this is working. Voice assistants are ranking as best seller products (more than 25 million units sold in 2018) and usage metrics show great feedbacks from customers. It is actually cool to ask a machine about the weather, the menu for food delivery or the availability of Uber. Up to a certain point…

The frictionless interaction with voice assistants disappears as soon as you start asking “human-like” questions rather than simple commands. In fact, the problem of designing an assistant that is scalable to all use cases is far from being solved and thus, the promise of frictionless interaction not yet fulfilled.

This leaves space for new entrants such as Wluper, with the condition that they bring strong value propositions and adequate market positioning.

Wluper’s unique technology and approach

In order to solve those issues, Wluper has steered away from traditional rule-based, handcrafted methods and developed new techniques to optimise user satisfaction and machine’s knowledge acquisition by leveraging state of the art deep neural network technologies. Wluper’s AI is able to learn from conversations in an unsupervised manner, meaning that businesses don’t need to develop “skills” by producing questions/answers and labelling every single sentence by hand.

Being able to learn faster without human intervention is also a way to scale. Wluper’s AI can answer complex questions with several levels of intent or context, capability which is far beyond the existing assistants that mostly handle one-way commands.

Positioned as a platform, Wluper is initially focusing on the mobility sector to provide navigational intelligence to mobility service providers and help them reduce friction with commuters in an ecosystem that is increasingly multimodal and complex.

Team culture and momentum

Last but not least, we were also quite impressed by the team and what they have achieved, not only before we met but also during the fundraising period. The founding team is made up of skilled engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs and we have been impressed about the traction that they have managed to build in a very short amount of time on different fronts.

We have seen countless companies in the field of chatbots and conversation assistants, many of them having some traction and credible products. However, we have been struggling to identify scalability factors or relevance in a market ruled by the Tech Giants. Wluper, however, has the potential to defend its space by making conversation assistants much more intelligent, human-like, and effortless to build.

We believe Wluper will transform the way humans interact with machines by making voice interfaces scalable and frictionless. Challenges ahead are many. The company needs to scale fast and conquer market shares, while improving their product and technology continuously but this is where we can help. Through our Business Hub, we will support Wluper to generate and sign commercial opportunities within our sectors.