Munich Startup: Who are you and what does Awake Mobility do? Please introduce yourselves!
Awake Mobility: We are Houssem Braham, Daniel Sattel and Daniel Tyoschitz, and we are putting an end to technical malfunctions in bus operations. We founded our startup Awake Mobility together in October 2020 to do just that.
Houssem is responsible for the technical development of our IoT platform and data science algorithms. In the past, he worked as a software engineer at various automotive companies, such as Tesla in Silicon Valley, where he co-developed technology for autonomous driving. He also worked at Konux, which is where he and our product developer Daniel S. worked together on their predictive maintenance solution. Daniel is also the contact person for all of our customers during the pilot phase. In the past, he worked as a senior consultant in the commercial vehicle industry and provided consulting for digital services.
Daniel T. is in charge of our strategic orientation and is also responsible for external communication. In the past, he worked as a founder and independent innovation consultant in Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Berlin. During that time, he helped SMEs advance in their digital transformation.
Detecting and solving problems before they cause downtime
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Awake Mobility: It’s a problem we’re probably all familiar with: You wait for the bus, but it doesn’t show up. One of the most common causes of this downtime are technical malfunctions. With our IoT platform, we make it possible for operating companies to maintain their fleet of buses based on condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. This allows them to recognize and resolve problems before they lead to downtime. It also saves operators the costs of organizing replacement buses and other measures to keep transportation going.
Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!
Awake Mobility: Fleet management solutions do exist, but that’s all they focus on. You can’t use them to perform predictive maintenance. Which is why we developed our own IoT hardware that allows us to read out the relevant health and operating data of the buses.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Awake Mobility: Collecting enough data to train AI properly is known to be a common challenge for every developer. On top of that, we had to gain some form of access to data to begin with. Like we mentioned before, that’s something the previous interfaces weren’t able to provide, which is why we developed our own hardware. What also surprised us a bit was how complex the whole subject is. But there ultimately had to be a reason why AI-based maintenance for buses doesn’t exist yet in 2021. In the end, however, that all just motivated us all the more to find a solution.
Awake Mobility: “It will include all other means of transportation”
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, and where in five years?
Awake Mobility: We just completed our first customer projects for further development of our platform and want to see our finished product in use in one year. The pre-seed funding that we recently completed will help us do that.
In five years, our platform will no longer be limited to buses but will also include all other means of transport as well.
Munich Startup: What do you think about Munich as a startup location?
Awake Mobility: Munich is great. We’ve spent a lot of time in big cities abroad, but we feel at home in Munich. Here you have a high quality of living, lots of talented people from the universities, super startup support programs, a strong deeptech ecosystem and bus companies that are open and want to collaborate with us in the digital transformation of bus maintenance.
Munich Startup: Public transportation or bike?
Awake Mobility: Bus, of course.
