Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Contunity (Radically Simplifying Electronics Engineering)
Période du rapport: 2019-12-01 au 2020-03-31
The design of PCBs is becoming an extremely complex, time intensive and error-prone task making companies struggle keep up with engineering projects. From a management point of view, electronics’ project behaviour presents bad predictability and there is a huge lack of skilled engineers. To get the job done depends on a complex sequence of events over which project managers and engineers have little control loose months of time struggle sharing knowledge over departments provoking inefficiencies in the whole process.
Imagine a world in which electronics developers can focus their time on tasks in which their creativity and innovative strength can be used to the maximum. Because the problem is obvious: The problems of the future have to be solved almost exclusively by technology and electronics solutions. There are simply not enough specialists available for this at the moment. At first glance, these problems seem difficult to solve. But Celus breaks this status quo. The B2B SaaS platform automates the entire electronics development process: component selection, circuit diagrams and PCB layout at the push of a button. Development time and time-to-market are reduced by 90%. In addition, know-how barriers are broken down and existing electronic modules are made usable through an IP database. The founders Tobias Pohl, Alexander Pohl and André Alcalde are driving this vision forward in a rapidly growing team of over ten employees.
Imagine a world in which electronics developers can focus their time on tasks in which their creativity and innovative strength can be used to the maximum. Because the problem is obvious: The problems of the future have to be solved almost exclusively by technology and electronics solutions. There are simply not enough specialists available for this at the moment. At first glance, these problems seem difficult to solve. But Celus breaks this status quo. The B2B SaaS platform automates the entire electronics development process: component selection, circuit diagrams and PCB layout at the push of a button. Development time and time-to-market are reduced by 90%. In addition, know-how barriers are broken down and existing electronic modules are made usable through an IP database. The founders Tobias Pohl, Alexander Pohl and André Alcalde are driving this vision forward in a rapidly growing team of over ten employees.
Recently, we were accepted to NVIDIA's Inception Program for AI Startups to get benefits such as hardware grants, marketing support or training with deep learning experts. Additionally, in the last year we have attended many different events to get the word about our project. For example, we were honored with an invitation by BOSCH for the Digital Experience Day 2019. Also, we received marketing and sales support by Telekom and profit from their vast customer network to help us grow. Finally, ESA BIC Bavaria (a Startup incubator program by the European Space Agency) gives us financial support and additional workspace for our growing team. This last partnership gives us access to many aerospace companies and will help us enable our technology to be used for electronics in difficult environments. We have designed a work plan for bringing our technology from its current state to a pre-commercial level (TRL-8), and investigated the risks associated to the creation of this project. We have conducted an in-depth market study to analyze new opportunities in different geographical regions, and applicable industries. We have studied new ways of commercialization strategies and the necessary actions for the further protection of our innovations. Finally, we have validated our financial business plan and projected revenues for the next years after the execution of the project.
Current electronic engineering process is long, tedious, inefficient, repetitive and error-prone. Usually, it consists on hundreds of thousands of components that need to be selected, checking also manually compatibility among them, and connecting a heterogeneous set of parts that requires a high level of expertise. Also, components need to placed following a long set of requirements and rules, considering the size of the PCB, components selected, temperature, space needed between components, etc. In terms of time, the design of a PCB can take between 3 to 6 months depending on its complexity, taking 90% of engineers time on manual work like checking the technical documents. Our B2B SaaS platform automates the entire electronics development process: component selection, circuit diagrams and PCB layout at the push of a button. Development time and time-to-market are reduced by 90%. In addition, know-how barriers are broken down and existing electronic modules are made usable through an IP database.