Asystom, a company that caters to all the technical difficulties of monitoring industrial machines, wherever the customer is.
How did you come to create the system?
I created the company because I found I was spending a lot of time on the other side of the world solving maintenance problems with additional misunderstandings due to language differences. Gradually, we realized that there was a great potential with the use of vibration and sound sensors that gave us the ability to analyze machine problems accurately.
Did you set up the company with the co-founders?
I co-founded the company with 4 people, one of the key people being our technical director whom I knew at a previous company. I recruited many people I worked with, and whose human value and technical experience I was able to appreciate. So I was able to hire very high-level people from the start. Subsidies for the creation of innovative companies and leverage on repayable advances are sufficient to have an effect.
What sets you apart from your competition / your added value?
What sets us apart from the competition is that all product R&D and all technologies are 100% controlled within the company. We have designed our technologies to be able to use them in any situation and in any industrial environment.
What were the main difficulties you faced from the beginning and how did you overcome them?
Finance is always the basis of war. Bearing the financial cost of company development, especially when it is very technical, it requires a lot of R&D resources. I believe this is the main risk and the real tricky point. For the rest, I think I was lucky to be surrounded by people of great value and a great pleasure to work with. Human beings ultimately remain our primary force.
How did you achieve this human contact?
It is essential that the person recruited can integrate into the team and that he or she brings resources, skills and talents, but also the ability to develop and adapt. I got this opportunity to find them in my network and in my acquaintances, directly or indirectly.
Why did you decide to raise funds and what are your prospects?
We raised funds reasonably well. We are still in the Series A stage for the final fundraising. The challenge and market we are entering today has strong traction, which is going to happen in the near future. It was necessary to ensure that the solution proposed by us was able to withstand this traction force and this increase in speed.
What will be your biggest challenges ahead?
Today, we have developed a lot on our technology and especially the hardware part, hence data capture and its processing. We often talk of edge computing, that is, processing of data as close as possible to the machine, and therefore of near-intelligence. All the levers applied are moving towards machine learning (automatic learning) or in other words intelligence over cloud computing. It is a question of succeeding in detecting breakdowns and faults thanks to artificial intelligence. The key thing in our strategy is to be practical and projective. We need to be able to respond quickly to companies with a fast return on investment. We must also ensure that the solutions they use are developed to bring them more intelligence. This is what is fundamental in the digitization of companies.
Want to become international?
Yes, from the beginning.