Scale-up Interview: Record Evolution
Record Evolution is the collaborative end-to-end IoT & AI platform that enables companies of all sizes to develop their own IoT products.
How would you describe your business idea to a potential investor (who is not an expert in your particular profession)?
The Record Evolution platform is a cloud service built to facilitate the development and wide availability of artificial intelligence (AI) in an Internet of Things context. Designed for collaboration, the simple-to-use platform serves as an organization-wide decentral hub for organizing teams and conducting IoT projects, effectively providing broad AI enablement within any organization.
Covering the complete IoT & AI development cycle with one platform
What problem do you want to solve, what is your goal?
We want users to get right to the truly creative part of IoT & data science — without having to set up an infrastructure or worry about the technical details. So we built an end-to-end platform for custom IoT development that makes it possible to skip the initial investment and know-how hurdle. Users get the entire infrastructure for connecting and managing remote IoT devices, harvesting and transforming IoT data, developing apps, all the way to machine learning model building and deployment.
Once you’ve set up your IoT and AI environment, you can use the platform as a foundation to build multiple use cases and even develop your own products on it. So this is really about making IoT & AI available to as many people and companies as possible. Access to top technologies should not be restricted only to those who can afford it — it is creativity, imagination, and the strength of your ideas that should ultimately count. And we give companies the space to develop just that.
Installing IoT apps on devices and device groups
How did you come up with your idea/concept?
Working on numerous data engineering and IoT projects, we have found that there is a discernible pattern to our customers‘ challenges. The high technical hurdles of IoT implementation and the communication gaps between AI experts and IoT engineers are the fundamental bottlenecks for our customers and a reason why so many IoT projects fail. Often, the timeline cannot be defined from the beginning and the costs are difficult to estimate.
Тhis is why we decided to build a collaborative platform that creates more transparency across company functions and is easy to use for non-experts.
Collaborating on the platform
What is your business model?
We are a freemium platform with a usage-based pricing model. The billable platform resources are the compute resources (CPU cores, memory, storage) needed to run data science tasks and the so-called app days, i.e. the time an IoT app is running on a device in development or in production. Everything else is freely available to users. In fact, the free resources are enough to build and run small-scale IoT projects at home.
Our public IoT app store will be an additional revenue stream—in offering a ‘platform within the platform’, we want to encourage third parties to sell their apps or app templates and make them available for the entire user community. Imagine you need a plant-watering app or need to track your pet’s location—all you need to do is download the apps, install them on your connected devices, and watch the data flow in.
Installing public apps on your IoT devices
So how does it all work together? What are the steps to realise an IoT and AI project?
To make use of the combined powers of IoT & AI, you first connect your devices to the platform using our custom-made flashing app.
Once your devices are connected, you begin to extract and load data for further analysis. You can install specialized data collector apps on your devices to tell them what data to send to the platform.
Right on the platform, you can combine data coming from multiple disparate data sources and consolidate it to deepen your knowledge about processes. Here are the steps:
- Cleanse the data coming from devices in real-time or near real-time.
- Start building machine learning algorithms once the data is transformed into high-quality data.
- Visualize your insights in customizable dashboards.
- Deploy to production. Using the knowledge generated on the basis of the data and the ML algorithms, you build IoT apps to deploy to production. From within the platform, ideally, these can be distributed across various fleets across the globe at the click of a button.
- Monitor & update. Now you have an iterative process and can continuously monitor your devices and performance parameters. You quickly adjust to changing conditions and roll out remote updates instantly.
In five steps towards full IoT deployment
What devices does the Record Evolution platform support?
Almost any PC-like system no matter how tiny it is. From thumb-sized boards to powerful AI-enabled boxes.
Where do you see Record Evolution in 5 years?
Within five years, we plan to have grown to a workforce of 300 employees, to be operating globally on an expanded palette of industrial IoT use cases, and to have made it into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms, where we see ourselves as a Challenger.
Marko Petzold, Founder of Record Evolution
Why did you decide to apply to Scaleup4Europe?
We hope to establish partnerships with corporations, co-create networks, and draw inspiration from diverse ways of thinking to deliver well-rounded outcomes that sustainably establish a culture of IoT collaboration.
Get more information about Record Evolution on their website or connect with the team on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
Record Evolution is part of the Scaleup4Europe Agile Manufacturing Lab Batch #1.
You want to join one of the four Scaleup4Europe Labs as well?
Get more information and apply at scaleup4.eu.
