With each of our innovator stories, we get a chance to meet the people behind EU-funded ideas, which have the potential to change our future for the better.
This time, we met Seva Matselyukh, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of OPT/NET, a Dutch startup whose AI product enables Telecom Network Operators to monitor and manage their ICT-Networks with Artificial Intelligence.
OPT/NET was selected by the jury as the best pitch from Dealflow.eu’s E-pitching Event dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
OPT/NET was supported by the EU with €813k in grants so far via different R&I projects, e.g., Goldeneye.
Tell us more about yourself and your work?
I am a Co-founder of OPT/NET and I am responsible for the Commercial side of the business which includes sales, marketing, and finance. I have an academic background in Finance but found my calling in Software Sales. I started off as a Sales Development Representative in 2016 at a Dutch SaaS company, and now I get to build and lead the go2market strategy for our own startup.
What problem is your product solving and what makes its solution unique?
The complexity of IT systems is increasing exponentially. The users running these systems are struggling to keep up. Inevitably, mistakes are made, and costly outages occur. One day of downtime can cost large enterprises Millions of euros per day and are expected to face 5 times such outages per year!
Our product “OptOSS AI TM” enables Network Operators to monitor & manage their IT-Networks at an unprecedented scale with Artificial Intelligence. It unlocks superhuman abilities for NOC teams to ensure the continuity of their critical IT infrastructures. Our proprietary and patented AI approach autonomously detects and clusters anomalous patterns of significance in logs, metrics, and performance indicators in near real-time, and can do so without prior access to training data.
How did you start your journey, and where are you now on the road to achieving your ambition?
OPT/NET started as a spin-off from a boutique consulting firm that specialised in helping network operators to recover from IT outages. To improve our consulting efforts, we started developing our own AI toolkit to discover the root causes of incidents in large quantities of network- & system- logs.
It is at this time we joined the European Space Agencies’ (ESA) Space Business Incubation Center (SBIC) in Noordwijk, where we obtained access to the space-worthy technology of ESA, which was proven in space helping to run multi-billion deep-space projects. The tech proved useful, and we pivoted from consulting to being a product-centric company that provides its tool to Telco NOCs and incorporated OPT/NET.
Fast-forward a couple of years and we now have a handful of Telecoms across Europe actively using the product. Our vision is to empower System Operators with actionable intelligence so they can be Super-Human globally! We have big ambitions and have a long way to go but are proud of having found our product-market fit.
What’s the biggest impact EU-funding has had on your journey so far, and can you specify an outcome?
We operate in the critical infrastructure industries such as Telecom, Banking, Utilities, etc. These industries are known to be conservative, and they are not the most startup friendly due to the drastic consequences of things going wrong. Working with startups… is risky. Being an EU funded startup (we have raised about €2M from Horizon projects alone) provided us with some much-needed early credibility which helped convince our earliest customers that we had built something unique.
Getting access to EU funding also helped us finance our engineering team in the early days to bring the product to an operational level.
Have you already tested your product with clients? What was it like?
We are very proud to say that our customers speak highly of our product. We have several Critical Infrastructure Operators who use the product to monitor and manage their most prized assets 24/7 where failure is not an option. In 2021, we were awarded, together with the Dutch telecom operator KPN, the CoSta Award for the best Startup/Corporate collaboration in the Netherlands.
What is your company’s greatest achievement to date?
My personal favorite was hearing from a customer that our product helped them pin-point the unknown root-cause of an incident within 1 minute. In the meantime, all their existing systems left them clueless. Getting praise from your customers is the best achievement a startup can get!
Besides this, we are also proud to be the smallest company mentioned as a representative vendor in Gartner’s market guide for our industry. We must be doing something right!
How do you see your company making a difference in the future?
We hope to positively impact the lives of people globally by assuring that the critical infrastructure we all use daily operates perfectly. If we talk about the UN Sustainability Development Goals, we directly contribute to SDG 9 by improving infrastructure resilience, and to SDG 12 by reducing the energy consumption of IT infrastructure to create a greener world. We already do this now and hope to scale up our reach over the coming years.
Why is participation in Dealflow.eu’s e-pitching event and receiving their coaching important to you?
It is always good to get feedback and contributions from a trusted third party who can provide a new and unbiased view on the way we present ourselves. I run through our pitch hundreds of times a month, resulting in me assuming what works and what does not. Getting a fresh perspective is a real plus! Also, what startup does not want the opportunity to pitch in front of investors?
How would you define success and what keeps you going in the pursuit of it?
As a commercially oriented person, for me it is first and foremost seeing improved traction. New customers, positive feedback, new partnerships, traction can materialize in several ways. We also really like to see our products and services making a positive impact on our customers. A happy customer energizes the team as it reassures each of us that what we are doing is making a real difference.
Article published by EurA AG.
The aim of innovator stories is to highlight and share with investors and relevant stakeholders in the industry, insights, and unique stories from some of the most innovative EU-funded project that Dealflow.eu is proud to support.
If you are an investor who wants to connect with OPT/NET, please feel free to reach out at [email protected]
More about Dealflow.eu
Supported by the European Commission, Dealflow.eu discovers and supports the most promising EU-funded innovators and connects them with relevant investors and corporates. The initiative was launched to help groundbreaking innovations secure the funding needed for their future commercialisation by offering them tailored support and matchmaking services.
To learn more about Dealflow.eu, visit https://dealflow.eu/
Disclaimer: Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
