“We are seeing an increase in the field of digital twins. These twins mean connecting the physical world and the digital world in the best way possible. This is reflected in the fact that we can take a physical object and represent it digitally reliably,” Yariv Geller, CEO of Vayeb, told Globes. This area received a boost during the Corona period because it was more difficult for people physically to get to places and with teams of people. “They preferred to interact with a digital asset rather than a physical one,” Geller said.
The start-up VHiveWhich developed a system for the production of digital twins for physical assets, announced today (Tuesday) the completion of a $ 25 million fundraiser, which will accelerate the dead global growth and expansionWinches. The total investment in the company since its inception has reached $ 36.5 million. According to market estimates, the company’s value currently stands at about $ 150 million. “We raised exactly the value we wanted,” the company’s CEO Yariv Geller told Globes, adding: The company has already come up with a significant customer list, and we are in a growth phase. So we are raising around real business activity and less future dream. “
The round of funding was led by the American investment fund PSG, combining existing investors such as Octopus Ventures and the strategic investment arm TIP of the German communications giant Deutsche Telekom. Also, Ronen Nir, a senior consultant at PSG will now join the company’s board of directors.
The company was founded in 2016 by Yariv Geller andTomer Daniel, VP of Technology and started operating about a year later. Since then the company operates from Herzliya Pituach around the world. The company’s goal in the establishment was to allow organizations to use skimmers to gather information from the field and better understand their assets.
In fact, the company has developed a system that allows organizations to collect information about physical assets, in order to create a digital copy of the asset (what is defined as “digital twins”). The system collects the data in an autonomous process and using skimmers, and builds two-dimensional and three-dimensional models of properties such as buildings, communication towers and cranes. The company’s second phase was to incorporate artificial intelligence (trained by information collected from its customers) and digital copy processing and analysis capabilities to generate business and operational insights – such as cost savings and the creation of new sources of income.
The vHive system / Photo: Sivan Daniel
These insights depend on the industry itself, but for example in the media worlds, which is the company’s first and main industry now, its system knows how to automatically detect all types of equipment installed on the tower and create full specifications. In this way, they can actually monitor the property on an ongoing basis and map the quality of service that the cellular company provides to the customer. At the same time, their system knows how to perform preventative maintenance and point out things that require repairs or immediate treatments.
“We can take our success and replicate it in markets like insurance or renewable energy”
The company includes 20 employees in Israel, and 10 employees in the US and Europe, the new investment will expand operations to Asia and Africa. In light of the new recruitment, the company plans to double the number of employees in the coming year in Israel. These include: Deutsche Telekom, American Verizon, etc. These are global companies with many sites around the world, so the good news for them is a system that centralizes all their assets and sites in one place. However, the company has no Israeli customers at all, .
How was the company established?
“Tomer and I met when each of us was in Boston. I was at MIT at the time, and Tomer was sent by a company he worked for to integrate with an American company they had acquired. And this sounds like a joke, but two Israelis go upstairs together at MIT, discovering that they are Israelis and that they are geeks who love technology. “Then each of us worked for a big company, Tomer at Intel and I at Converse, and we both felt the need to go back to our entrepreneurial roots and do things ourselves, which is hard to do in a big company.”
“Thanks to the new investment, we will be able to take our success in our first field, which is the worlds of communications, and replicate it into other verticals, in markets like insurance or renewable energy – which is to say wind turbine and solar panels,” CEO Geller told Globes.
Beyond the technological gospel and the integrated system the company offers, Vayeb offers a message in safety: “Today the current way in the media world to understand what’s going on in a hundred-meter tower is to take a team of climbers that rises and endangers its life and brings pretty spot information,” Geller explains. “Instead of the workers being there for a whole day and endangering themselves, the skimmers can be raised to half an hour or an hour of sampling, thus achieving the space and the important whole.”
If you ask Geller about their competitors, he will say that no company knows how to collect the data from the field and create digital coordination with customized insights. “There are quite a few skimmer companies, and there are good companies in Israel as well. For example, Percepto manufactures skimmers and focuses on hardware – and their development, a skimmer in a box, is suitable for certain uses. We are much more focused on large and distributed infrastructures over very large areas, “Geller explained.
The company’s business model is based on annual contracts, Geller explains: “Contracts with customers are annual contracts based on the number of properties they have, from towers to buildings. Can lead to a collection of capabilities from the system such as analysis of the data and gaining insights. ” According to the company, in the last three years it has managed to triple its revenue from year to year.