Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneur Torben Friehe on Why He Is Eyeing Africa

1aim

, a full-stack AI building platform that is helping businesses use and manage their commercial spaces more efficiently. Among other things, 1aim

develops and produces access control systems which enable users to open doors with mobile phones.

According to Friehe, 1aim is now in talks with commercial real estate developers across the region, with a particular eye on South Africa, Nigeria and Angola, to implement his platform.

I had the opportunity to speak with him in London this week to learn about 1aim and his regional ambitions.

There's much talk about 1aim in the start-up community. Can you tell us more about the company?

Sure. We are creating an AI platform that changes how buildings are used, managed and secured. I realize that sounds a bit ambiguous, so let me give you some more details.

If you look at corporate expenses, the two most significant are salaries and real estate. On one side, you spend tons to make your employees effective. You give them software tools like

Slack

and

Dropbox

. You make a real effort. On the other side, even though real estate is your second largest expense, you have no idea how well you utilize your space. Research shows that 40 percent can go underutilized. It's an insane figure. This means inefficient office space management costs U.S. businesses $113 billion annually. It's a massive pain point, but one that has flown under the radar because the technology to assess it has been so poor.

Until now, companies didn't have the technology to solve this problem. That's what we offer them today - a full-stack AI building platform. Think of us as a central nervous system for office buildings. Our platform collects all the building data, interprets it intelligently and performs a series of actions as a result. It tracks, monitors and analyzes how a business uses real estate, and also creates operational recommendations.

Our platform consists of hardware, software and server infrastructure and has four main components - secure access and identity management, data collection and analytics, tools allowing you to plan and allocate space efficiently, and an improved smart-workplace user experience that creates a

WeWork

-like climate.

We have already rolled out phase one, our LightAccess Pro access and identity management system, which allows businesses to manage employee access rights and identify space usage patterns.

In phase two, they will be able to analyze space usage in real time and perform tasks to improve efficiency. For instance, our AI will secure areas as employees leave, manage utilities, intuitively merge building and inventory management systems, and create a real-time workplace model that reveals inefficiencies and pilot-tests strategies.

We've heard of products like Nest for residential users, but they have limited functionality. That's a bone of contention with the Internet of things (IoT) industry. Too many companies offer the "same old product with a chip inside," like a blender you control with an app. The smart element doesn't add value. Where are you with the first phase of your platform, LightAccess Pro? Give us an example of what it can do.

Sure. Picture this:

You're the president of a big public company. You have a 30-acre campus in France, and international offices covering 600,000 square meters. A core part of your team is young engineers who do complex technical work.

You understand how hard it is to find the right engineering talent. So it is a priority to keep them happy. Instead of hiring a group of engineers in each country of operation, you offered your French team to work on global shifts for extra pay, spending a few months per year abroad at your offices. Since they are young and motivated, they agreed. But after the first few trips, things took a bad turn.

Retention rates fell. When you raised the issue, you learned that the traveling had been a nightmare. It was a headache for the engineers to get their identification authorized, find where to work, and receive access rights when they arrived to a new location. They didn't even have Wi-Fi, and couldn't print or buy food in the canteen.

With our platform, you overcome these problems. You can provide access rights over vast commercial space and monitor, control and analyze the movements happening inside.

After you implemented our platform, your tens of thousands of global employees were able to instantaneously enter any building required for their job. All the sudden, your hovering French engineering team was able to move between your offices without needing to exert additional effort to get things up and running.

Our platform also allowed you to see who was entering and exiting every door across your global commercial space, and to learn that 30 entire floors were sitting empty.

After talking it over with your management, you decided to use the space productively. You assigned space using our data insights and not only saved an annual cost of tens of millions of euro, but also earned extra revenue from leasing space to other businesses.

Can you tell us how you started the company?

My co-founder,

Yann Leretaille

, and I have been friends since high school. We loved science and technology.

We collaborated on a number of projects at the time. The most interesting was an international student competition, in which students build CO2-powered dragsters. The project grew out of my love of racing.

We won several prizes for our designs and were later appointed competition ambassadors.

After graduating, we enrolled at university. But studying was never our thing. Instead, we continued working on different projects together.

Yann loved cryptography, and somehow came up with an idea for a technology allowing online IDs to be created while authenticating them with offline devices. We combined his concept with a technology letting you use any phone to transmit data. We saw how many problems were caused by our university's access control system. So we thought, "Hey, let's build an access control system." And that's what we did.

It started as a simple idea - to open any door with any phone.

But during our initial pilot tests, we saw that access is the centerpiece of so many other systems in a building.

Deutsche Telekom

, with whom we held our first pilot test, asked us if we could also record who went into which meeting room when. We said, yes. Then they asked if we could track how people moved in their space. They said they wanted to record that data for years, but couldn't find a solution. We realized the technology in buildings today is mostly 20th-century leftovers, and that wouldn't cut it in this day and age. Companies want to record their data - especially building-related data that is valuable and can't be otherwise recorded.

Access is the ideal way to record this information. Collecting data with an access management system gives you quality data connected to your ID that you can't get anywhere else.

This is when we came up with the idea for our platform.

So, long story short, Yann and I dropped out of university in 2012 to work on the project full-time.

We opened 1aim in 2013. We lived and worked in a friend's office furniture warehouse for two years, sleeping under our desks and basically living hand to mouth.

But we grew, and in 2015 started securing major investments.

The first was from venture capitalist

Lars Hinrichs

, founder of

XING

, a social network for professionals that is often called Europe's LinkedIn. This allowed us to wrap up our development of LightAccess Pro. British tech entrepreneur

Brent Hoberman

also chipped in, as did

Matthias Ummenhofer

, the former head of venture capital at the European Investment Fund. Another big investor was

Florian Moerth

, who is involved in EU tech start-ups.

In 2016, we attracted investment from the

Hormann Group

, the world's fourth-largest door manufacturer. It has several billion in revenue and 1,600 employees globally, offering on-site door installation and support in Europe. The partnership is nonexclusive and puts us in the enviable position of having a leading player selling and installing our products through its distribution channels.

I want to ask about security, because this is a critical issue for the IoT industry, as we have seen recently with the Bluetooth vulnerabilities known as "

BlueBorne

." I know LightAccess Pro uses Bluetooth. What are you doing to ensure you have airtight security?

First, we do not see ourselves as an IoT company. As you noted, the IoT industry is flawed. Trendy, but flawed. It was a powerful concept, but in the past several years we have witnessed its heart-wrenching commercialization. Now, any product with a chip is "IoT" - from blenders to wooden toy robots whose eyes flash when parents press a button on an app. Development cycles are short, companies hire external engineering on a project basis, and security is an afterthought.

For us, security is the priority. It has to be because we service businesses. They answer to their clients, personnel and board, and entrust us with their safekeeping.

This is why all our hardware and software is designed and manufactured in-house, so we can leverage 360-degree control over the technological process. We employ 25 top-notch mechanical, electrical, software and product engineers. Some worked in the defense sector - in the military and at Boeing. Others have been coding since they were kids and exemplify everything great about those "good hackers" you see on TV.

LightAccess Pro offers Bluetooth and three other technologies, including our proprietary protocol. Our users mostly turn off Bluetooth. We think businesses should prioritize the other technologies, because Bluetooth has inherent flaws. We rarely encounter businesses who want to use it, but some still do. We have minimized the associated risk.

What "BlueBorne" shows us is that there is an issue with insecure low-level stack implementation. I can't offer an easy solution. But I will say responsible companies shouldn't just throw up their hands and say, "These things happen." As an industry, we must rethink how we implement stacks and introduce new best practices.

So you're looking to make an entry into Africa; what's so compelling about the African market?

Urbanization and mobile penetration.

Regional hubs are experiencing an unprecedented demand for quality commercial space due to economic growth and urbanization. Lagos is an example. Modern commercial real estate is being built and the price is high at up to $100 per square meter. This means tenants will want to use space efficiently.

Our LightAccess Pro hardware and software also interfaces with your phone, so mobile penetration rates are key. And they are skyrocketing in the region, with 1 billion devices on the continent.

Young urban Africans are also leapfrogging wealthier peers in Europe as far as certain mobile technologies are concerned, like mobile payments. Many are offered by local players that learned to deal with the lack of expensive data-consuming smartphones.

So our building solution fits in perfectly. It works with any phone, even feature phones. It also helps companies deal with issues of scale by maximizing space efficiency. Data usage is minimal and there's no need for a constant Internet connection.

AI is seeing a lot of press. How will AI and algorithms impact the world economy?

Their impact will be decisive. But there is an ethical dimension that is all too often overlooked. It's important for the industry to start considering the ethical implications of technologies during the actual development process. Yann and I found that these issues worry many young people today. But industry stakeholders are behind the curve. This is why we teamed up with colleagues to open a nonprofit called the

Good Technology Collective

, which addresses issues at the crossroads of technology and society. We've attracted high-profile experts to our council, including

Annie Machon

, the activist,

Ida Tin

, co-founder of the popular app

Clue

, and

LucianoFloridi

, the

Oxford Internet Institute's

professor of ethics of information. We have greatly been aided in this process by our founding member,

Cy Leclercq

, and our economist and researcher Nicholas Borsotto.

E-mail: mfon.nsehe@gmail. com