Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many partners do you have?

Florian Eggenschwiler: About 200 plus of various sizes.

Sramana Mitra: Is it more of the smaller ones?

Florian Eggenschwiler: I would say there is a slight skew towards the smaller companies. They tend to be locally focused and are quite flexible to react to local requirements.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Do you follow my writings in the PaaS space?

Florian Eggenschwiler: No, but it sounds like I should have a look.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a large body of work that I’ve published in this space. We have a particular interest in this space as well. Let me ask you the final question. You have partners in retail. You have partners in public transportation, but your technology has applications in other 10 domains where you want to build different partnerships. What are those open problems where you are seeking partnerships or you would like to develop expertise?

Florian Eggenschwiler: One space that we’re excited about is smart buildings. Being at the tail end of this pandemic, we learned a lot about remote work. We’re also seeing that there’s value in going back to the office. A lot of real estate is being evaluated in regards to the right size for companies.

There’s a big question about downsizing or rightsizing. How do I best distribute my employees given that more companies are moving toward a hotdesk model? Our sensors can help understand the occupancy level of buildings. That’s a space where we hope to grow quite a bit.

Sramana Mitra: Any other space? What about manufacturing?

Florian Eggenschwiler: We think our technology is more relevant for public or semi-public spaces. It can be universities, museums, zoos, or galleries. These are all exciting spaces. I think they’re all dwarfed by smart buildings.

Sramana Mitra: How do you find these partners, especially the small ones?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It’s tricky. There are different languages and geographies involved. We target them through digital marketing and also by attending trade shows. If you’re looking for solutions with high accuracy for people counting and flow measurements, there are not that many technologies. For the one that we deploy, I would say we’re quite a household name. They are likely to find us.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. What is the genesis of the company?

Florian Eggenschwiler: It started out with this airport use case of measuring wait times. One of our founders used to work for a CCTV company. His brother and a friend had tremendous experience in edge computing. That’s how it started. We saw that there were other application areas. That’s how we branched out.

Sramana Mitra: You’re venture-backed?

Florian Eggenschwiler: We’re PE-backed.

Sramana Mitra: The founders built the company up by bootstrapping and then got PE involved, is that it?

Florian Eggenschwiler: They went to PE fairly early on. The company was profitable quite quickly. Our founders are still significant shareholders.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis
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