First startup in Arkley Launchpad Program - Senstone!

We met Nazar Fedorchuk - Founder & CEO of Senstone in the Demo Room of organised by Arkley - Hardware Massive CEE Event in April 2017. At that time no one expected that one year later we will meet again to sign first bilateral agreement.

"We decided to join Arkley Launchpad because of the great portfolio of Arkley VC and their focus on hardware plus software projects.  On top of that, we are located ‘next door’ to them (Lviv/Kyiv) and this makes our communication even more seamless and easy-going." - Nazar Fedorchuk, Senstone Founder & CEO

The story

The story behind Senstone is kind of those we like the most - its was invented to make our daily life easier. Nazar Fedorchuk - a lawyer, taking notes for most of his career, invented Senstone to solve his personal problem of having a fast and easy way to capture  ideas, thoughts and reminders on go. This is how an Oxford grad lawyer came into startups’ world.

“I could never keep all the different small things, like ideas or tasks, in my mind, although many of them could be very important. I had a gallery of stickers, sheets, e-mails, and reminders in my phone – and somehow it didn’t work.” - Nazar Fedorchuk, , Senstone Founder & CEO

The team

The idea remained an idea for about a year until in Winter 2016 he met Roman Kravchenko and joined Kyiv IoT Hub and received his first external investments.  He was then joined by future partner and CPO Markiyan Matsekh, a wearable and product manager expert with more than 6 years of experience. It took overall 12 months and aver 12  iterations with 3 different teams of hardware engineers to create a prototype and finally try the first version of Senstone.

“I remember testing it out with my wife Orysya. Amazingly, the device was able to recognize her rare Ukrainian name.” - Nazar Fedorchuk, Senstone Founder & CEO

Today, the team is more than 8 people based in Ukraine, United States and Canada. Hopefully, in the near future also Poland.

The technology

The device is a first portable voice assistant and was named as a “voice-recorder makes Star Trek comms badge an AI notetaker” by Slash Gear and has a strong technology behind (2 patents pending).

- Speech-to-text and the intelligence behind it:  Analyze sentences, structure and keywords, Extract hashtags and intonational footprint, Proprietary Natural Language Processors to analyse voice patterns  

- AI Personalization and Self Learning System: Recognize names and extract subjects, Summarize the transcript, Understand context, organize notes by action items and synthesize  

- Notes to ‘Emotes’: Extract emotional/prosodic footprint and analyze speech quality, Remove ‘crap’ and repetitions (infer from colloquial references into formal EQ), Interpret persuasive, confident or dynamic voice

The traction

The traction is based on Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns (for Indiegogo campaign the goal of 370 000 USD was reached in 36 hours) - 3 500 units in pre-sales + 70 countries.

Kikstarter:

2,745 backers pledged $302,023

Indiegogo:

$407,000 USD total funds raised

The plans

"Our short term plans are to launch the product to the market and scale our business in many countries and continents.  And the long term goal is very simple: just like people talk to each other in spoken language, we in Senstone believe machines should be capable of understanding people the same way.  In ten or less years keyboards eventually will seise to exist." - Nazar Fedorchuk, Senstone Founder & CEO

Senstone is the first startup joining acceleration program Arkley Launchpad. Startup founders who are also looking for operational and financial support can contact us at hello@arkley.vc or apply here.

Article based on: http://senstone.io/story-behind-senstone/