2019 Wrapped

Everybody looks back on their year in December, to remind all the fortunes and misfortunes of the year. Both are crucially important for the development of the company. So, we in Hepta also decided to look back on our year to reminisce, to think through what we learned, to celebrate and to be prepared for the next year.

As a startup, of course there is a lot of things to write about, but we tried to draw together main events and achievements of the year.

TEAM

Through the year we hired 15 people and reached the “30 people in our team” milestone. To think that in August 2017 we started with only 3 people, by the end of 2018 we had 19 people on board and now we have 30 people! For us, this is a fast growth. Now, one who can add numbers probably sees that they don’t add up. We’ve had some movement both ways, people joining us and people leaving. It’s the natural course of a company.

To be honest, we couldn’t be more happier with our key hires! Let’s go a little more into detail:

Chief Administrative Officer with 7 years of previous experience of being information specialist and service manager, managing paperworks, the team and keeping an eye on financial matters.

VP of Software Engineering with 11+ years of experience in the field and who has successfully and efficiently helped a current scale-up company from PoC to MVP to production.

Junior Developer with less than 1 year of practical experience, but with a strong interest in Java back-end development. Additionally he has 1 year experience in Quality Assurance. His main focus is on Java and Python development with some additions in AWS, LiDAR management tools and some theoretical knowledge at front-end.

Project Manager with 7 years of previous experience in manned military aviation as a helicopter pilot and flight safety officer, preparing and conducting helicopter flight operations day and night with varying complexities, investigating aviation mishaps, developing and managing safety program in the organisation

Project Manager’s Assistant who is new to the field, but has 6 years of previous experience in managing and leading personnel, communicating with clients and organizing events.

Hardware Lead who has experience in designing and constructing/maintaining industrial equipment and machinery. He is quick-witted and always thinking about how to improve our drones and how to make our workshop environment and work flow better.

BUSINESS

Most important achievements in 2019 are related to growth and international awareness. From 2 customers in Estonia in January, we managed to attract 7 more customers from 5 new countries inside and outside of Europe by the end of this year. Not to mention – 2 additional countries and customers will be signed in the beginning of 2020. Our agressive sales strategy has included building strong and trustworthy relationships with big international organizations, enabling us to shorten sales cycles and find credible strong leads in 50+ utilities worldwide.

Having closed our first seed round of 650 000€ in the beginning of the year has made us top competitor in airborne laserscanning, strengthened our competitiveness in data acquisition and furthermore – scaled our autonomy behind our software products & analytics procedures. This year we also decided to stop developing one of our own drones, because we just couldn’t accomplish the stability of the engine that we were aiming for. Therefore we turned to a hybrid engine solution and are developing that in full gear.

Aforementioned has enabled us to bring over 2x faster and 30% more accurate end to end analysis results to our customers. As a “side benefit” – we happen to pollute air around 106x less than conventional inspection methods.

A LOOK INTO 2020

2020 will bring more countries, customers, data processed & analyzed and – more autonomy to our software. We have a few cool innovative tech-perks in plan with our customers, which we will share to our followers during 2020.

Join our journey on social media platforms! You can find them at the footer of this page.

Wishing you a Happy New Year!