Simple Map Reflects on Growth and Expansion: A Year of Learnings with Venture Fund Support
Simple Map Reflects on Growth Investment with UNICEF Venture Fund
Simple Map (formerly Rentadrone) was a recipient of bridge funding from UNICEF Venture Fund. In this blog post, the team shares reflections on its successes and challenges faced during the growth investment period.
Tell us about the biggest achievement of the investment period.
During the investment period, we began to sell our services beyond Chile, which is our home country. We’re now in other markets making an impact by inspecting solar assets and agricultural crops with our two artificial intelligence algorithms using drone imagery. Also, our team was able to improve the way we manage high volumes of data. In the past we struggled to manage millions of data inputs at the same time. Now we can manage our digital twins smoothly and efficiently using new algorithms developed under the scope of the UNICEF Venture Fund Bridge funding.
How have you grown your user base and expanded into new markets?
We've expanded our impact to Australia, Mexico, and Europe with our algorithms, securing sales in these regions. Our current focus is on exploring new funding opportunities to sustain our growth within these markets. During the prototyping phase, working with real, paying customers demanded a high standard of quality in the reports and deliverables deployed for each contracted service.
Tell us about your user testing and field experience with product usage.
Our most noteworthy field test was at the Nyngan Solar Plant in Australia, featuring 1.3 million solar panels. The high data volume posed a challenge, requiring enhancements to our algorithm for counting and naming each panel individually. Given that this was our second solar plant in Australia, delivering a top-notch service to meet customer expectations was a key focus.
Tell us about your business model. How has your business model and strategy changed over the last 12 months?
Our business model has evolved; initially, we had drones in our seed round funding. However, in our current model, we operate solely as an analytics company utilizing third-party raw data. An important development in recent months is our partnership with Unleash Live, expanding our AI services beyond agriculture and photovoltaic energy. We can now offer diverse services to other verticals, including transmission and distribution of electricity.
Where are the biggest challenges you think your company will need to address or work around?
Our competitors have access to big funding opportunities and they have grown faster than ourselves. Being the only company in Latin America that offers these kinds of solutions is good in a way, but really challenging in many other aspects of the business.
What companies, organizations, individuals, or industry partners are you looking to collaborate with? How do you think they can add value to your growing business?
We’re about to sign a deal with a big construction company that’s focused on developing enormous solar plants here in Latin America and Europe. Hopefully this new agreement will improve our company capability to close deals of the same nature.
What are your main goals you want to accomplish next year?
We are looking to achieve a global long term contract agreement with any international energy company.
How has the UNICEF Venture Fund supported your solution?
The bridge financing was particularly helpful during a tough fundraising environment and it kept the company innovating for one more year. The most interesting support that we’ve received was in terms of software development and impact metrics. Our advisors in both of these subjects were really professionally dedicated to these matters and had a lot of helpful information.
Get in contact
Interested to learn more about Simple Map? Learn more on their website.
Stories by this author
Cleaning Up the Future: How INS is Using AI to Detect and Monitor Waste
Read StoryRelated Stories
