Finalist | relayr (Germany) - WunderBar: Making tech approachable

03/10/2015  |  CODE_n Alumni, CODE_n Winners, CODE_n15 Startup CONTEST

Our CODE_n Industry 4.0 finalist relayr combines hardware and cloud Software-as-a-Service: Their flagship product WunderBar is a sensor kit with 8 sensor channels, 6 Beacon BlueTooth 4.0 modules and a Wifi Master module. The WunderBar is for rapid-prototyping new smart solutions combining hardware and software while the relayr OpenSensorCloud provides 6 SDKs, APIs, rich documentation and tutorial apps.

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Where did your idea for the company come from?

relayr: The Internet of Things – devices and objects being able to communicate with each other independently – is changing the way we interact with the world around us by making everything from dishwashers to production lines smart. But we realised that one key thing was missing – the accessibility for developers and businesses to rapidly bring their ideas and prototypes to life.

To create new IoT products you need a stable and secure cloud, hardware to prototype and SDKs to start developing your software. Our idea was to create the entire package, the relayr stack, that includes everything a developer or business needs to start creating their own smart devices and solutions that will help them innovate new products, or make their existing products more efficient and more productive.

For which kind of audience is your product or service intended and what problem is it solving?

relayr: We provide both businesses and developers with the tools – cloud based PaaS, hardware and SDKs – they need to create brilliant new ideas that capitalise on connected devices. A great example of how this can work is Insulin Angel, who is also exhibiting at CeBIT. Insulin Angel was able to take relayr tech and bring their smart medication monitor to market rapidly and affordably. This was impossible before when companies would need to source hardware, develop SDKs and then have to work out how to stitch the whole solution together!

Tell us a bit about the company’s founders like their professional or industry background and the origins of the founding idea.

relayr: Harald, our CEO and founder, has over 25 years experience in the ICT industry. He was an executive at Cisco Systems Europe as well as at SynOptics, Wang Laboratories and other US high tech companies. Recently he was one of three Managing Directors at Attensity Europe. Jackson, our co-founder and CPO was the co-founder of MONOQI and 8hertz (sold to VoxGen). Designed and marketed consumer and developer facing internet platform products for MONOQI, XING Mobile, XING API, Holtzbrinck and VoxGen/8hertz. Both Jackson and Harald are incredibly passionate about empowering businesses and developers to easily create their own solutions – it’s why they set up relayr!

On a funny side note: Your WunderBar solution resembles a chocolate bar. Does this help people to overcome their inhibitions when dealing with a rather complex, technical product? What makes your product more beneficial compared to competing ones?

relayr: Exactly! New technology can be daunting, but we want to make tech approachable and easy to use and the chocolatey casing gives us a great way to do just that. But although the WunderBar is fun, it is also powerful and flexible enough for devs and businesses to create the connected products and solutions they need to start propelling themselves into the IoT.