Our venture leader alumnus Uepaa beats Google
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Uepaa wants to enable direct peer to peer connections. 2013 the first version of the app for hikers, skitourer and other outdoor sportspersons was launched, followed by a financing round of three million Swiss francs in February 2014. venturelab has talked to Mathias Haussmann, CEO and founder of Uepaa, about it.
How is it possible for a little Swiss startup to beat Google?Well, first, it is an internal testing, and we were testing the different proximity SDK per the relevant criteria of our clients. Therefore, also those tests need to be challenged.
But we are certainly very proud of the fact that we’re ahead of the competition when it comes to relevant criteria. And at the end of the day it’s all based on the longtime experience with the p2p technology (our safety app), our DNA, that leads back to the ETH Zurich. Besides we’re working on it exclusively and are not selling another SDK along the way.
Google is not that bad. There are other providers who are way less on track if you compare them with Google or Uepaa. How is your product so much better than the rest?
We don’t know why the rest of the SDK’s is lacking behind. But it is certainly a failure of the providers if for example smartphones would create weird noises or the connection to the standard wifi hotspots don’t work anymore. I guess they were not fully developed. As anywhere else, I’d say there is an 80/20 rule here too. The rest of the 20% of the jobs take up the rest of the 80% of the time and were not invested everywhere apparently.
How did you start your company and what have you achieved so far?
After the launch of our Uepaa App 2013/2014 we’ve received four reactions – and it was a challenge of our knowhow too, to stresstest the p2p technology. Today, we certainly benefit from the past years where we’ve intensively worked on themes like x-platform performance (android to iOS) and background discovery. Because of these themes we couldn’t integrate other competitors to the benchmark testing.
What’s your vision? Where do you wanna go with Uepaa?
With the expansion to the US our goal is to be the most frequently used third party proximity SDK until the end of the year. Not only on the technical side we want to be named as ‘industry standard’, but also on the commercial side. In parallel we’re working in proximity analytics, that offers whole new possibilities in the field of social chatting.
You’ve opened offices in San Francisco. What’s the first feedback from the Valley?
It’s not easy at the beginning. But we’ve started well and the concrete client discussions and implementation requests have already multiplied within the first weeks. Proximity has definitively established in the Silicon Valley and is on the agenda of top shots too. LinkedIn for example has made an approach itself – it’s very exciting, and we see a lot of opportunities to bring Swiss quality engineering to the market.
