CardioID’s goal was to produce a technology that would allow changing of routines of authentication and biometric identification of users and they did it by monitoring the heart signals. Each one of us has a heartbeat or a cardiac morphology that is unique – like a fingerprint.
CardioID’s core team, all comprised of electrotechnical engineers, first came into Beta-i’s fold when they participated in the first Lisbon Challenge. When the Beta-i’s team took the challenges of Smart Open Lisboa to them, they didn’t hesitate to put in their contributions towards better mobility in the city. They implemented their product CardioWheel: an Advanced Driver Assistance System that acquires the electrocardiogram (ECG) from the driver’s hands to continuously detect drowsiness, cardiac health problems, and biometric identity recognition.
We spoke with André Lourenço, one of the co-founders, about their path to the perfect product and their participation in SOL Mobility.
ReThink: What was your goal when you started CardioID?
André Lourenço: We had an ambitious goal – to have a base technology that could be applied to multiple scenarios. So we thought that authentication using the heartbeat could change our way of interacting with technology – from cell phones, computers, gaming consoles… anything where you can use your hands – we could identify the person and personalize the experience.
We talked with a lot of people but there wasn’t a go-to-market for that technology at the time – although we do hold the patent of the intellectual property – so we had to develop the technology further, to fit market needs. Because of our science background, we had a solution and we were trying to find the problem when usually it is the other way around.
RT: Is this how you got to your product, CardioWheel?
AL: Exactly! As CardioID evolved, we were looking for a market and we had always thought there was potential in the automotive industry, giving the user experience and the inherent problems of driving. So we started making changes to focus on the automotive industry.
RT: Did you change your vision to adapt to the market?
AL: Everything connected to the more operational side of the business was essential to make the product more marketable. Fleets and the managers are looking for lowering costs – those are the pains of a businessman. So, we had to integrate our base technology in a bigger idea that allows for optimization of a fleet.
But we really think this technology can make a difference and better our lives – there’s still so many car accidents. We know there are autonomous cars coming, but that’s not happening tomorrow. CardioID still maintains humans in command of cars but enhances our experience to be safer and smoother. But that is just one thing.
We believe this technology can go much further than cars.
RT: In which industries do you see CardioID in next?
AL: We have a base technology that is algorithms. We also made some hardware because it didn’t exist at the time. So we basically have a technology that can measure signals and process them locally, and that can be applied in anything. Namely, in the area of critical facilities and monitoring of “lone workers” – someone who has to climb a high voltage pole or inspect a pipeline, or other dangerous environments, by himself. Our tech can be embedded in a t-shirt or a band, and the process of analysis of fatigue and stress can be added. We can have these signals monitored by others or by the person themselves – giving him an awareness of his own conditions.
[wonderplugin_carousel id=”3″]
We saw immediately a slew of companies that we’d been trying to work with, giving that our product was ready to market. We needed a connection to them and SOL accomplished it very well.
RT: Why did you decide to join SOL Mobility? What were the main attractions the program had for you?
AL: The main attraction was the industry that was involved. We saw immediately a slew of companies that we’d been trying to work with, giving that our product was ready to market. We needed a connection to them and SOL accomplished it very well. It was an interesting deck of entities and companies, and we especially liked that several of them had national reach, even though the programme is “Smart Open Lisboa”.
RT: How was the process of working with a utility?
AL: Ferrovial in particular opened up for us, and they have been a great partner. We’re very happy to be working with them. We’ve made more contacts that are still on-going. It opened up a lot of doors for us that we are now developing relationships with. The programme aims to establish procedures and create visible milestones for both sides and it was really effective. The pilot was a real deployment of our technology with a big enough scale – that was important to us.
RT: You partnered up with Ferrovial – what is the pilot about?
AL: We are monitoring the whole driving experience of Ferrovial’s fleet. We’re using not only CardioWheel – which analyses the physiological signals of the driver – but also monitoring the car and the driving and the road itself. We applied complementary technological units to have a system that allows optimizing the costs of the operation and simultaneously greatly improve the safety of the driver.
It’s still early for the results, but we’ve observed some interesting things already. We have several driver profiles, that consider region, type of vehicle, driver’s physiology, route and incidents of the job. For example, there’s a big correlation between the number of incidents (weather, etc) and vehicle consumption.
RT: What were the biggest advantages you took from being in Smart Open Lisboa?
AL: The biggest advantage was the structure of the pilots and the contacts with the companies involved in the programme. The fact that we had all the entities and companies connected to mobility in the same room was very interesting – just having all the players in mobility there brought up ideas that connected with each other. That was a major plus.
RT: Would you recommend Smart Open Lisboa to other startups?
AL: Yes! There’s still so much to do in mobility. We’ve had so many ideas, we wish we had the time to it ourselves. But to take advantage of Smart Open Lisboa, a startup must be mature enough to develop the pilots and apply the technology on a national scale, that’s important to take notice.
You can take a look at CardioID’s pilot presentation below:
For more updates and articles, subscribe to our newsletter.
Mind the Bridge and Beta-i, under the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) initiative, have recently presented the “SEP Monitor Report”, a report that looks at the Portuguese startup ecosystem in depth. “Portugal Rising” was the title of the last SEP Monitor, presented at the end of 2015, and a year and a half later we can now say it was right since Portugal is growing twice as fast as the European average.
The scaleup ecosystem in Portugal is growing and it’s growing fast. In the last year over $130 million dollars of new funding was secured (40% of the total financing raised in the 2010-2016 timeframe), this means Portugal is growing 2 times faster compared to the European average.
Portugal registered 67 scaleups, with $350 million dollars capital raised. If we look a little closer, we can find that Lisbon is the ‘Portuguese Scaleup Hotspot’ responsible for $221 millions of the capital raised, having seen 27 scaleups, 17 exits since 2010 and 38% of new capital raised.
“Of the 17 Portuguese ICT startups that have exited since 2010, 65% have been in the last two years. In absolute terms, Portugal holds 15th place in the ranking of European scaleup ecosystems. While looking at Portuguese figures we need to consider that beyond the relatively smaller size of the Portuguese economy, the ecosystem is quite young. 76% of all scaleups tracked were established after 2010 – the European average is 67% – and almost half of them have been founded after 2013. The majority (88% of total) are small scaleups”, notes Alberto Onetti, Chairman of Mind the Bridge and Coordinator of Startup Europe Partnership.
Ricardo Marvão, Co-founder at Beta-i, added “it’s interesting to note international investors are playing a central role in the scale-up of the Portuguese ecosystem. 62% of capital made available to scaleups – 86% of later stage rounds – comes from abroad. International events such as the Web Summit, the Lisbon Investment Summit, and Scaleup Porto have been incredibly important in advancing the Portuguese scaleup landscape”.
Four out of five of the most funded companies in Portugal are “dual companies”, scaleups founded in Portugal that partially relocated their headquarters abroad while keeping relevant operations in their home country.
Another aspect is that mortality is quite low among Portuguese scaleups. Only 1 scaleup previously tracked has run out of business. The ratio (1.9%) is among the lowest we recorded in Europe. No cases of “early mortality” have been recorded in Portugal (no scaleups founded after 2013 have closed business).
The Web Summit is around the corner. You can feel it in the air and there’s is a frenzy of activity similar to what we experienced last year. This time, everyone knows what to expect. But is everyone really ready for it?
For us, the main value of the Web Summit, or any conference for that matter, comes from preparation! So, to ensure that the Portuguese startups get the best out of the Web Summit, one of the first activities that Beta-i will be hosting is the Road2WebSummit Bootcamp in partnership with Startup Portugal and Web Summit. For those who don’t know, this is an immersive 2-day workshop for the lucky startups chosen for the Websummit Alpha program. That is, a whopping 150 startups. The Bootcamp, running both in Lisbon and Porto, will offer practical and hands-on sessions to help them better plan, set clear objectives and milk the Web Summit before, during and after.
Taking some key learnings from last year edition, this year we have an even more focused program with excellent partners and speakers from Torke CC, Faber Ventures, Web Summit, Startup Portugal and also Beta-i’s very own in-house experts.
To give you a sneak peak, the topics we choose to focus on are:
Building Relationships with Investors at the Web Summit – Yes! building relationships, not getting investment. I mean, hopefully, you get it, but the investment can at times be a lengthy process. So we’re bringing everything back down to earth and speaking frankly about what is needed to start that relationship so that months after we will have a success story.
Building Relationships with Corporates at the Web Summit – While it’s not exactly sexy, sometimes it’s the right thing for your business. Getting a large corporate client onboard as a partner who uses your solution can reap the same or sometimes better results. But unlike investors, they are a whole different player to deal with.
How to Network like a Pro – Conferences in my opinion offer unparalleled networking opportunities. So many people, many of them interesting people, many of them not living in your country. The Web Summit brings so many people together you need to know how to approach them, filter them and move along to the next effectively.
How to Hack the Websummit Online and Offline – This will be an epic workshop giving you the tools to be creative and think outside the box to make your startup visible. Because let’s face it, the Websummit is a marketplace. It is huge and slightly disorientating, but for the Alpha startups, it is an opportunity to be seen!
How to pitch your Startup – Not only pitching on stage but learning the techniques of the elevator pitch and how to quickly introduce yourself so that my grandmother understands what you are doing for a living.
Goal Setting – Making sure that you know what you are going out there to do!
The Bootcamps take place already on the 18th/19th of October in Lisbon and on the 25th/26th in Porto and we’re looking forward to work with all Web Summit Alpha Startups:
