Heex Technologies completes a first round of 3.2M€ with Karista to launch Smart Data adoption
Paris, 29th of November 2022
Heex Technologies, a French deeptech startup providing Smart Data solutions, has closed a 3.2M€ pre-seed round with Karista as a lead. The fundraising is split between 2M€ in equity and 1.2M€ in non-dilutive financing. Other investors include Techstars, Google Black Founders Fund and Bpifrance alongside top business angels such as Alexei Chemenda. The investment has been made to support the product R&D and the acquisition of the first customers. This is an important milestone confirming the company’s differentiation strategy from their competitors, consequently proving that enabling seamless edge and cloud data curation to produce Smart Data is working.
In the past few years, companies have increasingly been working on incorporating AI to deliver ground-breaking innovations that would change the world and improve our day to day. However, these promising technologies are facing development challenges to go-to-market and perform reliably, safely, and sustainably.
Companies are struggling with the ever-increasing collection of data during AI-training and monitoring, creating capital intensive and time-consuming workflows, and ultimately delaying time-to-market of product releases or exacerbating operational risk.
Forced to realize that self-driving vehicles weren’t arriving on the road anytime soon, the founders of Heex Technologies realized that the industry was hitting a tipping point where something needed to change in the development process of these promising technologies. The Big Data paradigm is one of the biggest problems to address because the terabytes of data generated to build valuable datasets isn’t scalable. That approach is currently costing companies billions of dollars across different industries, and we’re barely scratching the surface in terms of data collection for connected devices.
To address this massive opportunity, Heex Technologies is committed to help engineering teams transition from Big Data to Smart Data by introducing a more sustainable way of scaling data operations. This approach is technology driven with software components deployed near data sources to trigger specific recordings and automating the process of building a valuable dataset, as opposed to the current manual processing.
On top of the technology, the startup provides web services to drastically improve productivity and workflows by enabling users to easily request and collect the data that they need to find the needle in the haystack by specifically focusing on the 1% most pertinent data.
Arnaud de La Fortelle, Co-founder and CTO: “We strongly believe that to reach reliable levels of autonomy in the ground-breaking fields of AI, robotics, or IoT, companies across industries will increasingly need to transition from accumulating all the data to extract primarily the data that is needed; because at some point development teams don’t necessarily need more data, they need BETTER datasets. This new investment will enable the company to scale up its product offering and build integrations with strategic partners.”
Founded in 2019, the startup was awarded 2 prestigious distinctions in 2022: the European Startup Prize and the BPI France R&D award “I-nov”. These grants further proved the potential of building an international technology champion around Smart Data.
Quickly accumulating a first set of clients and partners across America, Europe, Asia, and working on use cases such as autonomous driving, digital twins, predictive maintenance and computer vision, Heex Technologies is already on path to conquer different market segments such as Mobility, Smart City, Industry 4.0, and SpaceTech.
Bruno Mendes Da Silva, Co-founder and CEO: ”We are really looking forward to the upcoming months as we want to scale the company to address data intensive businesses and enable their adoption to Smart Data. Data now has a bigger footprint than the aviation industry and it’s just getting started. With the world becoming more conscious about being efficient to slow global warming, we are committed to foster sustainability by massively delivering our technology.”
Michael Thomas, Investment Director at Karista: “We finally found a brilliant team with a true vision around big data processing. Their approach to generate Smart Data thanks to a unique trigger technology is a key asset on a deep market in a current structural change where there is an ultimate need for enhanced and smarter datasets. It represents a breakthrough to accelerate the shift from R&D to production for many industries, starting with autonomous systems and targeting Space assets’ optimization as well. Indeed, autonomous systems are more and more prevalent in the Space economy, especially in the edge, with a profound need for better data management. So we are glad to support them in this first financing step and are looking forward to helping them build a strong market leadership”.
About Heex Technologies
Heex Technologies is a French deeptech start-up based in Paris providing a data management software solution for R&D teams working on advanced artificial intelligence. Through its intuitive web platform, Heex Technologies has developed an event-driven approach to automate the push of relevant data (the Smart Data) to the right teams within their organization. The company has been co-founded by Bruno Mendes Da Silva, Arnaud de La Fortelle, Ph. D, and Etienne Boutan, holding respectively entrepreneurial, academic research, and financial backgrounds.
About Karista
Karista is a Venture Capital firm investing in early-stage companies in France & Europe, especially in the fields of Digital, DeepTech, Healthcare and SpaceTech. Karista has financed ventures such as Sequans Communication (NYSE Listed SQNS), Nanobiotix (Nasdaq Listed NBTX) or Comitéo (sold to Natixis). Since its inception in 2001, Karista has supported more than 100 companies in Europe and generates a sustainable performance for its investors. CosmiCapital, Karista’s SpaceTech fund, invests in the Space economy currently boosted by the growing amount of data from satellites. As a strategic partner to entrepreneurs, the Karista team is recognized for its complementary skills and unique network.
