Sterblue offers a smart maintenance solution for electrical infrastructures.
CEO Geoffrey Vancassel kindly agreed to answer our questions.
What environmental challenges does Sterblue address?
Through more effective monitoring of critical assets such as power grids or wind turbines, we help reduce risks by anticipating potential damage. For example, a faulty electrical insulator fastener on a distribution network can lead to a downed line and serious damage to property, people and the environment. The 2018 California wildfires started by PG&E released 15% of all California’s annual CO2 emissions.
What solution does Sterblue offer?
Sterblue develops the central infrastructure inspection platform. We have three major components to our solution. Firstly, we build the tools to easily capture quality data, starting with drones and offering our automatic 3d navigation software around complex infrastructures.
Then we organized the data into a single model, enabling us to work with multiple customers and, above all, to train our artificial intelligence in a scalable way, without cumbersome and time-consuming re-training for each new customer and type of infrastructure. Finally, thanks to this structured data model, we are able to offer a wide range of analytics and reporting to our customers.
What added value does Sterblue offer its customers?
Deployability and modularity are key concepts in our value proposition. We offer a purely software-based offering, enabling automatic flight with off-the-shelf drones and the Sterblue mobile app. Our competitors design their own drones with a large number of specific sensors. This means we can deploy a customer anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, and access to data processing is also greatly facilitated. The latest customer to be deployed was in … Japan from … France!
The second aspect is the modularity of our solution. Our customers, although managing similar infrastructures, have extremely variable work processes, which can make it extremely complex to take these multiple requirements into account. Within our product, we have taken care to build multiple, easily configurable business “blocks” to meet this need.
And of course, artificial intelligence permeates all the different stages of our platform, enabling us to save a minimum of 25 to 30% time throughout the entire inspection and asset management process (defect & equipment detection, precise defect location, image sorting, etc.). ).
Have you identified any competitors? If so, what are your competitive advantages?
Our competitors today are mainly focused on hardware and software. Today, we have a software-only approach that enables us to offer very high levels of deployability and modularity. This also enables us to be very well connected within an ecosystem of other key asset management solutions (ESRI, SAP, etc.)
What is currently preventing Sterblue from fully occupying its market?
With the exception of a few advanced energy companies, the market is gradually beginning to see the benefits of integrated software solutions to better manage their assets. The education we’ve been providing over the past three years with business cases built up with a few major customers is starting to bear fruit. We’re seeing a marked increase in such initiatives around the world. Sterblue now operates in 16 countries on 4 continents.
FAQ
What is Sterblue’s innovation?
Sterblue is developing a central infrastructure inspection platform. They use drones to obtain data and then make it usable for stakeholders.
How much money has Sterblue raised?
Sterblue has raised $2.1 million.