Startup interview: Trinh Le-Fiedler, CEO, Nomitri
RTIH discusses startup life with former Wayfair Director, Trinh Le-Fiedler, including navigating coronavirus related challenges and building an alternative to Amazon Go.
RTIH: Tell us about Nomitri
TLF: Nomitri is a deeptech AI startup in Berlin, Germany. Me and my two co-founders started the company in August 2019.
Since then, we have managed to gather a team of excellent engineers around us to develop embedded/edge deep learning visual AI technology for smartphones and edge devices.
Our technology is nascent and we believe that it can bring great benefits to the industry and society as a whole.
Our first product focus is about developing embedded visual AI solutions for retailers to provide an autonomous self-checkout system without the hassle of expensive camera installations, cloud-infrastructure set-up and connectivity issues.
We enhance existing barcode scanning capabilities with an intelligent loss prevention and product identification solution.
Our unique smartphone-based self-checkout solution can be implemented within one day. Retailers can choose to use our white-labelled app or integrate our technology into their existing customer app.
Leveraging smartphones, we help retailers save high investment costs while creating a personalised and data-driven customer experience in stationary stores.
RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?
TLF: My co-founder Max came back from a conference in the US where he saw an Amazon Go store.
We were impressed by the technical achievements of the Amazon Go team but thought that AI solutions should be less invasive as to private data.
We wanted to create an alternative that does not require consumers to accept being filmed from the top to the bottom with video streams of them being analysed in some distant clouds.
Our vision is to use AI technology to offer the best customer experience at the lowest costs - both in terms of privacy matters as well as financial costs for the retailer.
RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?
TLF: The interest among retailers (and related service providers) is quite high: we have had the chance to present our solutions to many retailers already.
And we currently have several retailers that want to test and pilot our solution, despite being limited by the current Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
Right now, our self-checkout solution is being beta tested with two major retailers, one wholesale and one discounter. We expect to go live by this summer.
Overall, the reactions of retailers are quite different: some retailers are quite knowledgeable, hence only focus on ways to integrate our solutions into their existing systems while others need to be informed about self-checkout topics as such.
Reactions also vary by regions.
RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?
TLF: The biggest challenge is, of course, navigating during the Covid-19 crisis, especially on the sales and marketing side. It’s difficult to launch a product without the usual shows or on a virtual platform.
On the other hand, we believe that Covid-19 has made contactless shopping more relevant to retailers. Hence, we still get a lot of interest despite current constraints.
Same applies for product demo and testing set-up during a time when travel is not allowed or hotels are closed. We have to find solutions that allow remote product testing, which was hard but we managed to do.
Setback: We had permission from several retailers to go to their stores to produce video materials in order to train our AI model.
However, the lockdown in spring 2020 made all of that impossible and forced us to wait which resulted in a delay from our roadmap. Once the lockdown was lifted, we could catch-up again but it was frustrating since everything was uncertain.
RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?
TLF: I was a Director at Wayfair, a global e-commerce company, so I know that data and live interaction are the two biggest competitive advantages that e-commerce has compared to stationary retail.
You know your client because you have the data. And you can communicate directly via the screen to create a truly personalised and relevant experience. Stationary retail still has a black hole in this regard.
The retailer does not know who is in his store at what time doing what. And even if he does, there are few means that allow him to start a live communication with his customers.
We hope that our smartphone-based solution can address these two pain points: personalised data by basket view plus direct communication with the shopper through the smartphone while she is in the store.
RTIH: What's the best question about your company or the market asked of you recently by a.) an investor and b.) a customer?
TLF: An investor - How did you resolve the chicken-egg problem regarding recruiting talents and funding as a deeptech company who wants to do cutting-edge innovation?
A customer - Do you have data showing if consumers are willing to use their smartphone for checkout?
RTIH: What can we expect to see from Nomitri over the next 12 months?
TLF: In the past 12 months we have successfully assembled an international team of high-profile experts and have built a modularised tech stack in a new technology field that allows us to be super agile and flexible in terms of product development.
For the next 12 months, we will focus on monetising this unique know-how and accelerate product deployment in the retail space. The smartphone-based solution is just the beginning.
We will extend it with a smart camera system in order to help retailers address even bigger topics in other areas - all based on embedded visual AI technology.