Working with the Cloud has made a lot of things easier, particularly sharing data that is too big to be sent in an email. The Munich startup Olmogo has made revolutionizing the process their top priority: Instead of having an administration tool manage access rights, the data itself knows who is allowed to access it. The founders explain their plans in our interview.
Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourself!
Olmogo: We are Aly Sabri, Mathias Wasserthal and Heiner Hempel. Aly studied medicine and had already founded his first software company while at Harvard. Mathias — also known as Wassi — and Heiner are graduate computer scientists and are virtuosos on their keyboards. We all live for data sovereignty in our modern connected world and want to offer companies and consumers data fairness and control with our solution.
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Olmogo: When we put data in the cloud or send it by email, that data is not protected from being accessed by a third party. That is a problem particularly for companies and also for doctors, lawyers, etc. A lot of consumers also want more control over their data. With Olmogo, you can be sure that your data is only seen by those meant to see it.
Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!
Olmogo: There are a lot of solutions that encrypt data. It gets more difficult when that data is supposed to be made available to a third party. Imagine you have ten binders in a room that five people have a key to. But now Person A shouldn’t be able to access Binder 4 any longer. How do you make that work? If you take the key away, then A loses access to all the other binders. Taking the binder out of the room isn’t ideal either.
The complete business logic within the smallest unit of information
We don’t have that kind of problem, because every mogo (which is every binder in the example) knows who is allowed to access it. A mogo is the smallest unit of information in Olmogo and is something we invented. A mogo contains all business logic, making it independent from an administrator, that would for example determine access rights.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Olmogo: The first challenge was developing a concept for data sovereignty and data management that was genuinely sustainable. The second challenge was putting the complex technology in user-friendly software. What we have to do now is show partners how easy Olmogo can make data protection and data management. Olmogo can be used as backend for all applications, which significantly reduces the amount of effort needed for development.
Munich Startup: How is business going?
Olmogo: We started developing Olmogo in 2017 and founded our GmbH this January. For such a short amount of time, we’ve already started a number of pilot projects, for example in doctor networks, in a large hospital, with accountants and also with private individuals who work with our turn-key solution Olmogo S3. We already have more than 600 users and super feedback from all of them.
Olmogo takes care of all data management
Munich Startup: How do you view Munich as a startup location?
Olmogo: We think Munich is a good location for us and now want to get in touch with startups because we have a special partner program for young companies: They can integrate and use Olmogo’s backend in their software free of charge, which allows them to concentrate completely on developing their UI and business logic. Olmogo takes care of complex data management. There’s no trouble with the GDPR or data safety.
Munich Startup: Coworking or your own office?
Olmogo: We all work scattered about and from any location virtually. It’s important to us for every person to live as an individual — as a result, we have the best employees and keep motivation and output at a high level.