Back at the end of 2018 the team behind Flowbase was approached by Jaak Ennuste as they were trying to build a platform to digitalise outdoor media, it was called TADDY. The team was offered a spot in Elevator Startups second batch and work began on developing the business alongside the workshops offered by Elevator and with valuable feedback from IPG group, which is one of the largest media companies in the Baltics.
Going along with the market demands
As time went by, so evolved the business model behind TADDY and the actual problem in the industry began to show itself more clearly to the team - the media industry doesn’t need a platform to book billboards, it needs data on how many people actually see them.
So began initial pilots and technological implementations of gathering DATA from public spaces to estimate the reach of one or another billboard.
Due to COVID, TADDY started selling data about traffic information to outdoor media companies which proved to their clients that traffic hasn’t been gone and yet there has been a shift in the routes people are taking and as such was helping outdoor media companies in selling there media spots.
Why not create a spinoff
By the end of 2020, TADDY stared getting requests from other industries outside of outdoor media to implement their technology to gather data - this was the starting point for a spin off called City Data.
City Data was enrolled into Elevator startups third batch with a hybrid team of TADDY and new members. The main goal for City Data was to validate a business case to find a repeatable problem which could be solved by using computer vision.
The era of manufacturing optimisation begins
After Markus, one of early TADDY founders was speaking with his family member who was part of a large manufacturing company and explained how manufacturing optimisation happens there, a demo project was arranged which resulted in the initial MVP. This resulted a decision to fully commit to the manufacturing industry and rename the company to Flowbase, which is now building a first of it’s kind AI assistant for process optimisation in manufacturing.
In January 2022 Flowbase closed it’s pre-seed round of €250’000 euros and has since joined the Nvidia Inception and AWS Activate programs. In total Flowbase has serviced more than 20 manufacturing companies and is now raising it’s seed round, which is estimated to close by the end of Q1 2024.
Here is an interesting case-study from one of their recent blogs, where they outline the solution to keep tabs on factory floor health, in order to minimize motion waste > https://flowbase.io/articles/save-500k-yearly-with-factory-floor-health/
