Evaluate and develop opportunities

And as entrepreneur, you have to be convincing. And we used resources from university and also from a national, resources on a national level. To be more specific, we used labs from a organic material science club, chemicals, offices.. Thanks for support from the group, it was very helpful, especially in the beginning. We also used support from University of Twente, meaning that there is a STW grant for 40k valorisation grant, and University of Twente offers courses to prepare for that grant where they train young scientists how to apply for this grant, which is very valuable sets of skills. And to be honest, that’s the place where we meet our venture capitalist, who is Ray Quintana, who later invested in us.

The reasons why we thought now we’re going to go for it, it’s economically viable, started out with simple desk research into the typical problem topics in different types of markets so aviation, agriculture, heavy industry, oil and gas, stuff like that. And it became very apparent that we could calculate very easily the types of damages in those markets. And it became also very apparent in talking with these markets that they hadn’t really found a solution for their problems.

And then when we were at a point where we saw the types of effect that the Robird could achieve just by testing it, and we were convinced about the fact that we could improve the technology to a level of sophistication, a level of control, a level of maintenance that would be acceptable. Even though it would take many years to get there, we thought, OK, this is the moment. Now we have to go for it. Along the way we saw different opportunities arise because we engaged with those clients, and those clients gave us feedback where we thought, hey, but there’s multiple business opportunities here. We could develop other technologies with the knowledge that we have.

And so because of that feedback of the clients, we could immediately develop new opportunities of which we knew that the markets wanted to have them. Arianne, he is a lot about relationships and storytelling, and he thinks that there’s a lack of meaning in the stories that we create these days. And for me, I’m really about emotion, and I think people are turning more into robots and I want to bring that back. That’s the idea. So all four of us, we see that problem, and we reflect that onto the work that we do.

So we create work that is aesthetically pleasing, that has order, that has a story to tell, that is meaningful and also has a soul that can reach out to people. We used multiple resources to develop our product and our company. First of all, we highly used our network of suppliers, knowledge, experience, and so on. But we also highly used resources in the form of financing. There was an own investor but also with grants that were available in the area that we’re situated in.