Author - Louis Juste
Zetako, the lossless data compression startup, has made important progress in the past months. CEO Claus Rosenberg tells us more about their participation in the Valley’s biggest incubator, their PoC and their latest prototype.
You were recently invited to become part of Plug and Play (the largest corporate incubator based in Silicon Valley) and their first batch of startups to work with corporates in the maritime sector. What do you hope to gain from this incubator and how will your solution benefit corporates in this sector?
Since our innovation is specific and big in how we treat data, it is important to build trust and verification around the technology and for that, we must work with design partners where we can implement the technology in existing technologies that will benefit from Lossless Data Compression.
The maritime sector is seeing a lot of innovation in the past years and a lot of focus goes into digitalizing the industry. Through PnP we were introduced to several corporates expressing challenges with large amounts of data being transmitted between the onshore network and the vessels. Connectivity at low bandwidth is only one challenge. Data security and the cost of transmission over satellite are other issues and in all three areas, we can provide a solution.
You’ve established a PoC with Euronav, the world’s largest crude oil carrier. What were the main outcomes of this PoC?
Euronav has more than 400 data points on each vessel and must be able to connect and gather data at any time. Low bandwidth often restricts access to the vessel through a regular RDP (remote desktop protocol). So, the purpose of the PoC was to build a Remote Connectivity tool that uses as little bandwidth as possible.
Our Zetako Atlas [prototype] product, which uses our Lossless Data Compression technology, is showing in benchmarks that it is able to maintain a stable and secure connection at bandwidth <15 kb/s. This is an improvement in the efficiency of 500 – 1 000% over RDP and TeamViewer.
What will the future of your partnership with Euronav look like?
The product is still a prototype and as such needs to be optimized, debugged and polished before we can go to market with it. We hope to continue this work in partnership with Euronav.
Is your short-term focus limited to the maritime sector or are you also looking to implement your solution elsewhere?
We have been positively surprised by the interest from the maritime industry and are in conversation with a handful of other companies looking at solving a number of different challenges, all of which could benefit from Lossless Data Compression.
Through PnP Maritime we met with people from DXC Technologies and they saw opportunities in a number use cases with their clients, from manufacturing to supply chain (warehouse) to automotive. At this moment, we are focusing our efforts on the maritime and automotive sectors as there are real problems and challenges we can solve with our solution.
What are your goals for the remainder of the year?
Besides getting Zetako Atlas [our remote connectivity tool] in a commercial version, taking it to market and working with the automotive sector, we are most excited about our new GPU version of our software.
Moving compression to run on the GPU will not only significantly increase the speed, but it will also free up the CPU which can then be used for other tasks. We are in a close relationship with NVIDIA and are running large live tests with one of their Cloud Data Warehouse clients in France. With this commercial traction, it’s time to get back on the fundraising trail and we plan to close funding by Q4 this year to further boost business development in the mentioned area.
Interview courtesy of our content partner Silicon Luxembourg