A pre-seed round of €3.2 million was raised by Heex Technologies, a French deep-tech business that manages data for autonomous vehicles. VC Karista, based in Paris, oversaw the investment.
There are two components to the total: €2 million in equity and €1.2 million in non-dilutive finance.
Techstars, Google Black Founders Fund, Bpifrance, and eminent business angels like Alexei Chemenda are some of the additional investors who are taking part.
The Paris-based business will make use of the money to support product R&D and find its first clients.
Heex was chosen as one of the top 10 European startups in clean mobility and was also one of the 30 Black-led European startups chosen to receive a portion of Google’s $2 million Black Founders Fund.
Co-founder and CTO Arnaud de La Fortelle state, “We firmly believe that companies across industries will increasingly need to transition from accumulating all the data to extracting predominantly the data that is needed; because at some point development teams don’t necessarily need more data, they need BETTER datasets. The company will be able to scale its product offering and develop synergies with strategic partners thanks to this fresh investment.
Heex Technologies offers a data management software solution for R&D teams working on cutting-edge artificial intelligence. The company was founded in 2019 by Bruno Mendes Da Silva, Arnaud de La Fortelle, Ph. D., and Etienne Boutan.
Before this concept, CEO and co-founder Bruno Mendes Da Silva concentrated on resolving the pollution crisis. But then he understood that there are more issues with mobility than just pollution.
Heex Technologies has created an event-driven methodology through its user-friendly online platform to automate the dissemination of pertinent data (the Smart Data) to the appropriate teams inside their organization. Additionally, Heex Technologies supports development teams with a quicker and more effective development process to create better autonomous vehicles.
The firm also offers web services that help users quickly request and gather the information they need to discover the needle in the haystack by concentrating on the 1% of data that matters most to increase productivity and processes.
The company is now working on use cases such as autonomous driving, digital twins, predictive maintenance, and computer vision with clients in America, Europe, and Asia.
The business, which has its headquarters in France, collaborates with US-based initiatives like Plug in Play, Microsoft for Startups, and Nvidia’s Inception program.
Heex was chosen as one of the top ten clean mobility startups in Europe and was also chosen as one of the 30 Black-led startups in Europe to receive a portion of Google’s $2 million Black Founders Fund.
“We are looking forward to the following months,” says Bruno Mendes Da Silva, co-founder, and CEO of the company. “We aim to scale the business to meet data-intensive industries and facilitate their adoption of Smart Data.”
“Data is only now beginning to have a larger impact than the aviation sector. Additionally, as the world becomes more aware of the need to be effective in slowing global warming, we are committed to supporting sustainability by widely disseminating our technology,” Bruno Mendes further added.
“We finally found a wonderful team with a clear vision around big data processing,” says Michael Thomas, Investment Director at Karista. “Their method of creating smart data is a crucial asset in a deep market during a current structural change where there is an urgent requirement for improved and smarter datasets thanks to a special trigger technology.”
Michael continued, “For many businesses, starting with autonomous systems and focusing on the utilization of Space assets, it represents a breakthrough in accelerating the transition from R&D to production. Undoubtedly, autonomous systems are becoming more and more common in the space economy, particularly at the edge, and there is a critical need for better data handling. As a result, we are happy to assist them with this initial financial step and look forward to working with them to establish solid market leadership.”
Image Credit: Heex Technologies
