August 22, 2007
Cognimatics: From Face Warp To Face Counting
What’s a startup team to do when it realizes that getting its software into smartphones, despite the giddy predictions of market research firms and investment banks, is not the fast track to growth?
The answer, stay lean, don't raise VC, and try another market – at least that’s what Swedish startup Cognimatics is doing.
The four year old company was founded by the same team that founded Decuma, a handwriting recognition for PDAs startup, founded in 1999 that raised VC (probably from too many investors leading to unaligned interests, we can guess) and was sold off to Canadian company Zi in 2004 in an assets sale.
The founders learned a few things from that experience and run Cognimatics as a self-financing venture. A couple still work as professors at a Swedish university.
They first targeted cameraphones as a way to commercialize their cognitive vision tech, which is a geeky term for software that can do useful things with images captured by a camera's image sensors.
Its product, Face Warp, has a design-in win with a mobilephone manufacture and that business generates most of the sales. Its installed base is 50M terminals, Håkan Morän, told us in a phone interview, and the plan is to continue to grow that part of the business.
Face Warp Your Cameraphone Pics (image source: Cognimatics)
Moran is the sales and marketing chief, and joined the founders a year or so ago. In the interview there was no disclosure of the name of the phone manufacture, but your a:c reporter did a little research and learned that SonyEricsson sells its phones with face warp software pre-installed - we assume it's Cognimatics'.
Without the outside money, the startup is very customer-focussed and realized a couple years ago there's demand in retail, selling its patented tech to surveillance camera and display manufacturers for use by retailers that want to know where to position products, and how many people entered the shop or where they went, that is, people and face-counter applications.
This is the market opportunity it is now addressing. It already has signed up customers to apply the tech in electronic surveillance camera and into digital displays. But the company still has no plans to raise outside capital, despite offers, according to Moran.
"Self-financed and organic growth is the strategy for the time being," he said.
A Face Counting package from Cognimatics
Now a retailer can know how many people look at an advertisement for an instore special, for example, and match it with sales. By moving the display around, they can get some numbers to better decide the right location for an ad or what type of ad gets people buying.
We think it is onto a good thing with this retail application. We recall that last year Experian bought VC-backed FootFall for £35Mpre-empting a planned IPO. It was into electronic customer monitoring, which is tracking shoppers. The fact that the company was about to float and that Experian bought it beforehand, suggests that there is some growth ahead for businesses developing this kind of product.
Your a:c euro reporter has seen a lot of startup teams underperform with this kind of computer vision technology over the years, especially research lab spinoffs. But Cognimatics has avoided the security camera market boondoggle, entered the mobilephone one, and is now positioning its technology in another promising one.
Read – Axis camera announcement
View Cognimatics
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September 27, 2006
Embedded Sensor-Maker DeepStream Raises GBP8M
3i has switched on to the rapid growth at Welsch startup Deepstream Technologies, a developer of embedded sensor components that offer the systems that host them significant energy savings. The UK venture firm led an £8M series B round, joining early investor Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.
DeepStream, which is based in Bangor, Wales, has won customers in the building automation market that use its sensor components in lighting switches. The plan is to use the new capital to expand its range of products for new markets in energy management, medical and appliance sectors, as well as expanding its operations to increase capacity.
The startup was founded in early 2003 under another name and bootstrapped itself until it got a £1.2M government grant to be spread out over three years. A few months later Doughty Hanson invested and the startup was re-named DeepStream. It now employs about 50 people and has raised total equity, debt and government grant funding of £25m, including this new VC round.
Read - 3i leads financing, joining Doughty Hanson to invest in DeepStream Technologies (press release)
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March 22, 2006
Nvidia's Buy Of Hybrid Graphics Gives Nexit An Exit
NVIDIA, a graphics processor vendor, announced it will acquire Finland's Hybrid Graphics a developer of embedded 2D and 3D graphics software for mobilephones and PDAs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Hybrid is owned by key employees and two VCs, Investor Growth Capital, which invested in 1998 and Nexit Ventures, which invested in 2002. According to Red Herring, it raised a total of €2.5M.
The Finnish company, which was founded back in 1994, has a long list of clients including Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Online Entertainment, Texas Instruments, Renesas, Philips, Bitboys and Esmertec.
Read - NVIDIA Corporation to acquire Hybrid Graphics (press release)
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March 14, 2006
Zealcore's time-travelling software debugger tool
Reading about ZealCore Embedded Solutions, a Swedish company that just raised a small round of funding, it’s hard not to think about airplanes and crashes, what with the terminology used, black boxes, reconstructing of events, and real time recording.
An airplane black box is like ZealCore's.
Actually, that's what the startup wants you to think of, crashes. How application crashes went down is the focus of some of ZealCore’s products, built to automate software debugging.
The firm says that computer software keeps getting bigger and bigger, with ever increasing complexity, and the potential for more software bugs as a result. It's especially acute in larger systems that are controlled by software, such as the kind of equipment used in power generation and engineering enviornments, it says.
The state of the art, is "diagnostics and maintenance" by lots of humans, not tools. ZealCore sells the tools that it feels have been missing from the market.
Swiss engineering firm ABB was one of its first customers.
Founded in 2001 the company's products are derived from research done at the Mälardalen Real-Time Research Centre in Västerås and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
ZealCore says that the university:
“… work led to the discovery of a unique technique allowing time travel and replay of complex embedded distributed real-time systems based on minimalistic software based recordings. “
It enables time travel? We’ll take one of those to go, please.
