Munich Startup: What does Datagon AI do? What problem do you solve?
Nathan Gruber, Co-Founder and CEO of Datagon AI: We help industrial customers make their quality management more efficient using AI. Our platform can use live data from production processes, for example from cars, dishwashers or chemicals, to make suggestions about when which inspections should be carried out. If, for example, a seat in a vehicle has been reworked, the system automatically recognizes that the headliner is often scratched during removal and an extra test could make sense here.
Munich Startup: But that’s been around for a long time!
Nathan Gruber: It’s true that predictive maintenance and computer vision are already largely industry standards, but we’re in the process of building up the field of predictive quality.
Approach for the broader industry
Munich Startup: What’s your founding story?
Nathan Gruber: After his doctorate at BMW, Andreas got to know me and together we built the first predictive quality cases within the group. After we felt the market need in benchmarks with other manufacturers, we decided to build a platform together with Fabian and Tim that makes these approaches accessible to the broader industry.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Nathan Gruber: Our software interacts as directly as possible with our customers’ production processes. If it holds up the process with problems, costs in the millions quickly arise. So it’s a major challenge to be fast and innovative at the same time and develop software to the highest industrial standards.
Datagon AI wants to shape predictive quality
Munich Startup: Where do you want to be in one year, where in five years?
Nathan Gruber: We’re currently strongly focused on the DACH market and want to expand to at least European neighboring markets within the next year. In five years, we want to anchor predictive quality in the everyday lives of industrial manufacturing and stand for predictive quality the way Celonis does for process mining.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Nathan Gruber: Munich is already very good and keeps getting better! In the meantime, the first generation of startup founders from Munich is reinvesting in new Munich startups, like Basti Nominacher (Celonis) or Hanno Renner (Personio) with us. That’s the same effect that made Silicon Valley so strong. This creates an ecosystem and knowledge is shared quickly. From our perspective, Munich is becoming a German / European hotspot for deep tech startups.
Munich Startup: Quick exit or long-term commitment?
Nathan Gruber: We’re very much looking forward to entering international markets and therefore definitely want to grow with the company for a while longer.
