#ParisFounders Event is only one week away and we can’t wait to meet the 5 startups that will launch on October 28th at the Hotel de Ville.
For this edition we have received 49 applications and we are thrilled to start the selection tomorrow.
Last July, DCbrain was one of the startups selected to launch on stage. Their interesting product and simplified pitch (talking about transforming physical flows into value is not so easy) won us over. For those of you who couldn’t make it for our #ParisFounders Summer Edition, DCbrain can be defined as the GoogleMap of IoT.
They give energy and cooling teams the simplest and most intelligent web interface to manage their data centers buildings by integrating all the sensors inside thanks to graphs and machine learning. This helps Data Centers and Campus operational managers to run and optimize their buildings by providing them with a systemic view of their systems by displaying a dynamic map of all the physical flows (energy, chilled water, heat …) and dynamic expert dashboards. In this way, they can focus on their real business instead of wasting time collecting partial information, correlating data with Excel and waiting for “the guy who knows this stuff” to call back.
So last week we decided to reach out to Arnaud De Moissac, CEO and Cofounder of DCbrain, to get some updates about their progress post-PFE.
How did you come up with the idea?
I used to work as a freelance on data centers efficiency and I’ve always been struck by the huge gap between the tools used by IT people to manage their apps, their servers and the tools used on the building side. Believe me or not, but most of the building guys still use Excel spreadsheets and large printed maps to run their data centers.
So we decided to use up-to-date technologies to help those people and to digitalize the physical world. And, by the way, we love to modelize stuff especially physical flows (energy, water …)
What has been the hardest challenge you have faced so far and how are you managing to overcome it?
We are basically engineers and techno minded people. So we had to hide all that technology behind a nice, simple and useful interface. Don’t forget that our customers are electrical or cooling people that don’t see the beauty of a distributed graph database with machine learning inside of it. We are still working a lot on the UX and on how to optimize physical networks as easily as you use Waze to optimize your route. And we’re hiring a biz dev.
What happened to DCbrain following your pitch at Paris Founders Event and how did the event help you?
We had x15 visitors on our site, received emails from VC and some contacts from leads. It was a very good training on our road to more simplification and a clearer USP.
What is DCbrain up to at the moment?
We just won the 1st price of ERDF SmartGrid startups contest (BigData & predictive maintenance). ERDF is the French electrical grid operator, and startups from the US, Europe were also in the competition. For us, it was a unique opportunity to really work on environmental issues and we’ve already started. The year of the COP21, it’s really awesome!
Unfortunately, our tickets for #PFENY are sold out, but you can still register on our waiting list here.