German Business Awards 2020

EU BUSINESS NEWS / 2020 German Business Awards 29 , Best Bespoke AI Solutions Provider 2020 Located in Central Germany, Evotegra GmbHEvotegra provides individual cross industry AI solutions for visual perception. Following the firm’s well-deserved success in the German Business Awards 2020, we caught up with CEO Tobias Manthey to find out more. Oct20657 Established in 2001, Evotegra GmbH is the leading specialists in artificial intelligence solutions and consultancy services. To begin, Tobias offers more insight into some of the firm’s specialisms and its existing client base. “As a full-stack solutions provider, Evotegra is offering the full service chain for individual visual perception solutions including smart data acquisition, highly automated labelling services, data quality control and change management as well as deep integration. We are specialized on large complex AI datasets that require hundreds of different classes using millions of images. Another competitive advantage is that our solutions scale from server solutions to embedded systems. “With our customers working in the automotive, mapping and industry, we can leverage on our rich project experience, while focusing on enabling the customer to master the challenges of digitalisation.” As the AI industry continues to evolve, remaining at the forefront of technological development is vital and as Tobias goes on to explain, doing so has allowed the firm to keep its closest competitors at bay. “Evotegra is rather unique to the market. As we look to reduce costs and time for AI projects in the order of a magnitude, we do so whilst being deeply involved in developing highly scalable deep learning solutions and the deep integration of AI solutions into customer environments. Our goal is basically to industrialize AI for vision systems.” Regarding the internal culture in place at Evotegra, much of the firm’s work is based on teamwork and as Tobias explains further this has led to a positive working environment with people remaining loyal to the company. “As a whole we think and act as a team. Therefore, for us the most important thing is to have a highly motivated team rather than having to rely on individual people. With our culture largely based on hard work and fun, we have found our staff turnover has been relatively low.” The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in 2020 being a very challenging year for most businesses. As Tobias points out, the AI industry has struggled in particular with a number of factors affecting the firm’s progress. “The overall demand for AI in Europe is still low. Therefore, the integration of AI into the industry is still going slow. After budgets and projects were cut following the outbreak of the virus, the impact on businesses such as ourselves has been significant.” Operating in Germany brings lots of pros and cons, however in regards to AI there are currently many challenges to master as Tobias explains further. “Europe is the most strictly regulated market related to data and AI in the world. E.g., while the goal of the GDPR was to guarantee the self- empowernment of the European citizen about their private data, it was not created with data driven economy in mind. As a result there is a high level of legal insecurity with respects to GDPR that further slows down the already inert integration of AI in Europe. With even more initiatives to regulate AI on EU level, we further risk to lose the competitive edge of the European industry.” Finally, Tobias comments on the future plans of the business as we look ahead to 2021 and beyond. “We are happy to announce that just in the end of 2020 we successfully launched our first initial data offering (IDO) on the Ocean Markt (market. oceanprotocol.com ) using a subset of our dataset for autonomous driving. Decentralized data exchanges allow to invest in data backed crypto currencies as well as to consume data. We see a huge potential in these crypto based data exchanges that I believe will become a pillar in the upcoming AI data economy. As an early adopter we want to build up a reputation as a trusted issuer of high-quality datasets. Within this year we hope to launch further datasets on the public markets.” Company: Evotegra GmbH Contact: Tobias Manthey Web Address: www.evotegra.com