Munich Startup: Who are you and what does Awake Mobility do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Awake Mobility: We are Houssem Braham, Daniel Sattel and Daniel Tyoschitz, and we are initiating the end of the technical disruption in bus operationsTo this end, we jointly founded our startup Awake Mobility in October 2020.
Houssem is responsible for the technical development of our IoT platform and the analysis algorithms. He previously worked as a software engineer at various automotive companies, including helping to develop autonomous driving at Tesla in Silicon Valley. He also worked at Konux, where he and our product developer Daniel S. collaborated on the predictive maintenance solution. Daniel is also our contact for all customers during the pilot phase. He previously worked as a senior consultant in the commercial vehicle industry and advised on digital services.
Daniel T. is responsible for our strategic direction and external communications. He previously worked as a founder and independent consultant in Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Berlin, where he supported medium-sized companies in their digitalization efforts.
Identify and resolve problems before they lead to failures
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Awake Mobility: Everyone is probably familiar with this problem: You wait for the bus, but it never arrives. And one of the most common reasons for such outages is technical malfunctions. With our IoT platform, we enable operators to maintain their bus fleets using the principles of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. This allows them to identify and resolve problems before they lead to outages. Operators also save the costs associated with organizing replacement buses and other measures to maintain service.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Awake Mobility: There are fleet management solutions, but they only focus on managing vehicle fleets. Predictive maintenance isn't possible with them. That's why we developed our own IoT hardware that allows us to read the relevant health and operational data of the buses.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Awake Mobility: Collecting enough data to properly train AI is, as we all know, a challenge for every developer. What was even more challenging for us was getting any kind of access to the data at all. As I said, the existing interfaces couldn't do this, so we developed our own hardware. We were a little surprised by how complex the whole topic is, but after all, there must be a reason why there isn't AI-based maintenance for buses in 2021. Ultimately, all of this only motivated us even more to find a solution.
Awake Mobility: “Include all other means of locomotion and transport”
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, where in five years?
Awake Mobility: We have now completed the first customer projects for further platform development and aim to have our finished product in use in one year. Pre-seed financing, which we recently completed, will help us with this.
In five years, our platform will no longer be limited to buses, but will include all other modes of transport.
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Awake Mobility: Munich is great. We've spent a lot of time in foreign cities ourselves, but we feel at home in Munich. Here, there's a high quality of life, plenty of talented students from the universities, excellent startup support programs, a strong deep-tech ecosystem, and open-minded bus companies who are eager to work with us to bring bus maintenance into the digital age.
Munich Startup: Public transport or bicycle?
Awake Mobility: Bus, of course.
