Meet Eyeflow
Mission: To democratize Artificial Intelligence
EyeFlow is the no-code SaaS platform enabling anyone to build computer vision applications with AI in a simple, fast and intuitive way. The platform teaches machines to understand the real world and solve real problems, simplifying complex issues using trained data sets. The process can be customized according to your needs.
It enables you to upload videos or images, identify and fill in what you want to detect, train the neural network and start using. Use cases can be anything from quality inspections (such as detecting wrinkles in leather car seats) to safety (identifying the presence of people on rail tracks or monitoring PPE during the daily routines of factory workers).
We caught up with CEO, Alex Sobral de Freitas, to see how they are getting on with the Sixth Sense programme so far…
What makes Sixth Sense stand out as a programme?
We’ve recently done some other accelerators, one in Austin, Texas recently, and I think the main difference is that Sixth Sense is very focused on the market. There’s a lot of thinking about how we can tap into demand and get real customers for the start-ups. This is important for us because access-to-market and finding real opportunities is the hard part for us. I’m a nerd, technology and software development is easy for me, but selling isn’t. Sixth Sense is bringing us lots of opportunities, avenues and confidence about how we can access demand that is out there.
What have you learned?
We are a little different to many of the other start-ups on the programme because we are quite experienced. We have lots of white hair! So it’s hard to teach us things but definitely the mentoring has been useful – particularly around how to pitch our company. I have no experience in raising funds – it’s not a particularly common thing in Brazil, certainly not like it is in the US. With that in mind I need direction when it comes to what investors want to hear about. As I said, I tend to be quite a technical guy so it’s good to know that investors are often interested in different things, not just the tech.
Have there been any particular highlights so far?
I think this would be how the pitch training is making us think differently about how we communicate what we’re doing. It’s opening our minds to the idea of presenting to audiences with different worldviews to us. We’re starting to think about what we do in a social impact way rather than the technical. It’s actually changing our view of ourselves.
Do you have a good relationship with the other cohort members?
We are starting to get to know each other. Everyone is very busy with this start-up life – it’s 100 hours a week. Very hard! But I look forward to Demo Day when we will be in the same place and have an opportunity to have lunch together. I’d like to use that time to get to know the other better – many of them are younger, with a lot of ideas, different experiences and points of view. It’s good to build a network – not only with customers and partners but other founders because we share a lot of the same challenges.
Have you made useful connections within Hexagon?
Yes we have. Hexagon is a huge company and the brand has a lot of respect in the marketplace – it’s incredibly useful for us to be associated with it and to go on this journey with the team. We are already involved in a project with a Hexagon customer – we have been working in Vietnam with a new car manufacturer called VinFast. They bought a product from Hexagon and from us which will enable them to inspect all vehicles in an automated way at the end of the factory line. It’s a fantastic use case for us to be able to show Hexagon, as well as external people, what it is possible to achieve with AI on the manufacturing shop floor. It’s a win-win partnership.
Is there anything you’re looking forward to in the rest of the programme?
I believe Demo Day will open some important doors for us. As I said, we don’t have access to investors in Brazil and so we are trying to raise funds in Europe and the US to support our global expansion. We have a lot of case projects in Brazil but we have global opportunities and ambitions. The biggest hope I have from the programme is for investors to hear me and understand what we do.
Thank you, Alex! Good luck on Demo Day!