This week, mHUB sat down with three teams that put systems and platforms at the core of their startup. Get to know a little more about Ant Robotics, Iothic, and Third Wave from their founders Maxim Antonenko, Chris Autry, and Adam Sobol
Where did your idea and value proposition begin?
Tell us about the growth you’ve experienced since your launch.
Antonenko: We’ve acquired our 1st customer, a shoe factory in the EU, and got $30k from him for our robot fleet management software. We’ve upgraded our engineering team with 5 more talented hardware mechanics and software engineers. Since the start of the mHUB accelerator, we built a new robot model specially designed for work in the manufacturing environment. We’ve met with almost 20 customers in Midwest. Because of those meetings, we got several mission-critical insights. We now better understand better how they work, their pain points, how they think, and what is important for them.
Autry: Iothic has taken some of the original maths and cryptography and developed a full-fledged decentralized authentication and encryption protocol, the Open IoT Security Protocol (OISP) that allows full interoperability between any assets regardless of operating systems, systems architecture, etc, as well as allow for decentralized distributed narrow AI and machine learning at the edges of large scale industrial systems. This is a technological first. The company has grown from 3 people to close to 25.
Sobol: We have seen significant demand and interest in our product from the US, EU, and Australia from agriculture, to mining, to manufacturing use cases. With our recent investment from Panduit, our work together will be focused on access control and prove yet another use for the solution.
What does the future look like?
Antonenko: We see Ant Robotics as the largest software company in the domain of transport robots, leveraging third-party hardware robots, as Microsoft leveraging third-party computer hardware.
Autry: Massive. The team will expand to beyond 50 employees this year. The company is headquartered in the UK with full subsidiaries in Canada, Singapore and we will launch a full-scale US entity before the end of 2021.
Sobol: We want to enable 100 companies to prototype, launch, and scale revenue-generating wearable solutions in the next 3 years.