French startup Heex Technologies announced that it has raised €6 million this week.
An astonishing 90 percent of data stored worldwide today was only created in the last two years. In the ever-increasing digitalisation of industries, engineering teams collect a vast amount of unstructured data, raising challenges in processing, exploiting, and regulation.
Take autonomous vehicles. The data gathered is over 5,000 gigabytes produced per vehicle per hour. The data is collected and often duplicated for purposes of continuous software improvement, supervision of operations, and sharing insights with stakeholders and governing bodies. However, in the ocean of data recorded, just a tiny portion is regarded as relevant.
According to Cruise, only 1 percent of the data it collected helped improve its autonomous driving system — and we know what happened to them.
In response, Heex Technologies provides a data management platform to engineering teams to transition from Big Data to Smart Data.
Its software autonomously optimises data processing to ensure customers can access the 1 percent of relevant data.
According to Bruno Mendes Da Silva, Co-founder and CEO of Heex Technologies:
"To continue to exploit the formidable potential of AI and automation, the goal is now only to extract the necessary data rather than accumulate it endlessly; development teams do not need more data; they need better datasets.
Heex provides customers with a platform to access the relevant data and share that with the right users, for purposes like supervision, system monitoring or continuous software improvement.
Customers need to configure specific events that determine the conditions for extracting the associated data."
In the case of autonomous vehicles, command centres might want to receive real-time notifications in case of a safety event like a near collision with a pedestrian.
The platform allows them to receive that snippet of data instead of constantly streaming all the incoming data. Simultaneously, the autonomous software provider receives other meaningful event data, like system performance issues.
Significantly, Heex performs data filtering "at the edge" in real-time. Consequently, lower data packages are sent to the cloud, leading to lower connectivity costs, storage costs and higher application speeds.
Its technology is complex- and software-agnostic. It adapts to the heterogeneity of sensors and software versions, making it easy to deploy for an entire fleet of systems like vehicles, drones, trains, boats and others.
Lowering data storage improves sustainability
Digital technologies are responsible for 3 to 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with predictions that they will skyrocket to 8 percent by 2030, and this is growing due to the increase in AI technologies.
Cloud and data processing fall under scope 3, where listed European companies must report on under the CSRD as of 2025.
Heex can help customers determine what part of their data can be eliminated or saved in less intensive ('cold') data storage, leading to ~60 percent less energy needed than storage in the cloud with continuous access.
Existing customer cases prove that Heex can eliminate up to 95-99 percent of the data being processed, resulting in a lower energy consumption of data network transmission and datacenter workload.
Today funds come from a pool of deeptech investors, including SHIFT Invest, Karista, and Techstars, and is backed by a loan from BPI France.
This second round of funding follows a first round of €3.2 million already led by Karista in 2022, bringing the company's total financing to nearly €10 million.
Yvan-Michel Ehkirch, Managing Partner at Karista, shared:
"Several market segments, such as transport, aerospace and energy, are already making better use of real-time data collected from space to earth, more soberly and efficiently, to generate new revenue streams and provide new services.
Heex and its Founders are already embracing the topic globally in France, Europe and the United States by launching an unprecedented technological solution".
Heex Technologies already works with major automotive equipment manufacturers in Germany and Asia, as well as with the RATP and Nokia in France.
In the United States, the company is working with the US transportation authorities on a five-year experimental project in California to retrieve relevant data from companies testing autonomous vehicles to improve the legislative framework and safety protocols.
Lead image: Heex. Photo: uncredited.
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