Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Darvis CEO Jan-Philipp Mohr (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around, what are some open problems that you would point new entrepreneurs towards?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: There are a lot of other sensory technologies which are exciting and could add a lot of value. We have a very big lab in Nashville where we try out a lot of things. It’s a very green field. In my opinion, there is still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to distributed computing, especially when you run multiple models and when you want to embed models in chips. There are still physical limitations in these hardware environments.

When it comes to sensor vision, there are a lot of sensors from which a lot of value can be derived. You can’t just have one input. You can see a lot of limitations in autonomous cars. We need a combination of a lot of data points to make a sound decision. I think there is still a lot of room for improvement. 5G is still a lot of marketing. In some areas, it’s great. There is potential.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about how Nashville came about. Why are you in Nashville? I love stories of where new geographies are coming up.

Jan-Philipp Mohr: First of all, Nashville is cool. It’s a city full of talent. It’s growing a lot. We ended up there because healthcare is there. It’s a healthcare hub for America. We wanted to get close to our customers and a different scene. The Valley got very expensive.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Jan-Philipp Mohr: When we think about young entrepreneurs, they need to raise tens of millions of dollars to start a business, which is crazy. It’s not so healthy anymore.

Sramana Mitra: Did you start in Nashville?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: No, we started in San Francisco. We were part of an incubator in San Francisco. The talent is very expensive.

Sramana Mitra: And very competitive.

Jan-Philipp Mohr: Yes. When you hire somebody, sustaining a family in the Valley is just insane.

Sramana Mitra: You made a deliberate choice to set up somewhere else and you chose Nashville. It’s not because one of you was from Nashville.

Jan-Philipp Mohr: Not at all. We were at the SelectUSA, which is a summit in DC. It’s a fair where you can talk to representatives of the individual states and they tell you about the living costs and things like that. We did a lot of research to understand where it made a lot of sense. One of our early employees is from Memphis. He said, “I’m moving to Nashville. Shouldn’t we build something there, because the Valley is not as it was? I would love to help you there.” We found a place. We got invited with open arms. We’ve been to a lot to a lot of accelerators around the world to use it as a reality check.

Sramana Mitra: Have you raised financing?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: Yes, we’ve raised $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: From US investors?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: US and German.

Sramana Mitra: What is the connection with Islamabad?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: I was always staying in hacker houses in the Valley because I thought it was so expensive to stay in hotels. I was staying in one and there was a guy who’s running our country operations and said that it’s an up-and-coming place.

Sramana Mitra: It was pitched to me as a company with over $5 million in revenue. Do you want to share any more metrics?

Jan-Philipp Mohr: We have grown more than 200% last year. I’m pretty sure we’ll do something similar this year. We have a lot of big customers whether it’s in the retail or DIY space. We have gotten multiple hospital systems that are starting to promote us. One of them is Advent Health in Florida. We got accepted by the whole community. We’re just excited to grow from hospital system to hospital system, and from warehouse to warehouse.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Darvis CEO Jan-Philipp Mohr
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