A VENTURE PROGRAMME SUCCESS STORY
Intelligent cloud-based solution for industry from Indoor 4.0
“Working in IoT and the M2M [Machine-to-Machine] service sector for the last eight years helped me to spot an opportunity to work in a specific IoT segment, helping industrial companies to improve their processes,” says Marco Marques, the CEO of Indoor 4.0, about the idea behind their project. The young startup’s progress belies its age: Indoor 4.0 is now a professional partner of SIEMENS and Pick to Light. This fast-growing company is one of the successful startups that was supported by the EIT Digital Venture Program in 2019.
It all starts with a unique idea
The Venture Program offers funding and mentorship for teams with a good tech idea - and Indoor 4.0’s team had one. Having worked in the industrial field, Marques kept getting requests from companies looking for an inexpensive solution to help improve their processes and shorten timescales. “I needed to have a product that was developed in such a way that it reduced the adaptation time on the customer's site. New systems usually need changes in the processes in order to adapt to the system. That would be counterproductive and against our main goal of improvement,” observes Marques.
The pre-acceleration Venture Program was a great opportunity to make the concept real. BGI, the local EIT Digital partner in Portugal, helped the team with incorporation and the development of the MVP (minimum viable product). “We were three founders and when we started our project, we faced so many hurdles and obstacles on the way. We already knew of EIT Digital and heard about its Venture Program, so we took the chance and enrolled,” says Marques about the beginning. “The first steps were much easier with the support of the organisations and we gained dozens of new contacts during the programme.”
3 key success factors
Marques defines the key factors of success in three words: productivity, ubiquity, and reliability. Indoor 4.0 is working on industrial projects, therefore the team needs to develop efficient systems. Being ubiquitous means that the startup can work in a wide range of sectors. And reliability is a master key: their solutions are complex but easy to integrate and work with, while the gathered data and extracted information are secure.
Indoor 4.0 builds systems using big data, IoT and cloud paradigms. In the field, sensors and trackers collect data from production, the supply chain or products and workers too. The gathered data is stored in a cloud, where Indoor 4.0 can perform any kind of analysis and create tailored reports about the customer’s production processes.
This data-based solution might sound familiar, but the tracking given by the Siemens devices and the innovative custom-made specific hardware of Indoor 4.0 are truly impressive. Moreover, Indoor 4.0 supports its reporting process with AI applications: giving extra flexibility and opportunity for prediction. Overall, this young Portuguese startup integrates the most important industrial paradigms of today in its solutions.
Click here for more information on the Venture Programme 2020
