South African big data and artificial intelligence (AI) startup Kriterion is working on securing funding to further commercialise its product after securing clients in the telecoms and mining sectors.
Founded in July 2018, the Pretoria-based Kriterion provides real-time actionable insights to improve asset availability and performance by leveraging an organisation’s big data via its AI-enabled Kriterion Platform.
“Clients in heavy industries, such as mining, power generation, oil and gas, or telecoms, are challenged with maintaining large fleets of assets. With the conversion between IT and OT systems, more data is becoming available to better monitor these fleets of assets, but it can still be difficult for operators to manage them effectively,” co-founder Ricardo Ludeke told Disrupt Africa.
Applying AI to an organisation’s big data, Kriterion is able to generate actionable insights that drive business value.
“Our core product is focused on asset performance management and improves the reliability and availability of physical assets, while minimising risk and operating costs,” Ludeke said. “This is done by identifying anomalous operating behaviour before failures occur, tracking this degradation and suggesting effective remedial actions to maintenance operators.”
This innovative approach has seen the self-funded Kriterion secure clients in the telecoms and mining sectors, the latter secured after it was a winner at the recent OCP Group Mining Challenge, earning the right to trial its solution at a mine in Morocco.
“We’re in the process of raising funds, but as you can imagine the more traction we have the better for us, so we’re actively working on getting our current projects to turn some revenue,” Ludeke said.
Funding will be used to commercialise the startup, and allow it to scale effectively in accordance to its sales pipeline, across three continents. Ludeke said it is expecting further growth once the appropriate investors have been engaged as it is expected that they will also contribute to the sales pipeline.
“We are currently busy with projects in South Africa and in Morocco, with ongoing negotiations to kick off projects in Australia, the United States and the Philippines,” he said.
“The customer pipeline is substantial across three continents, and as soon as Kriterion completes its seed capital funding process, the uptake will be significant.”
Kriterion’s revenue is “process and solution inclusive”. Data review and analytics revenue are based on data input volumes, and reporting is based on a fee per asset or asset class per month.
