I was in Trbovlje for the first time in 2011, when we were looking for a data capture solution for our race car with the Formula Student team. A member of our team knew Dewesoft as they had helped him build a home-built go-kart before, so that was the first connection. During the development of Formula Student, I had the opportunity to meet many of the companies we have worked with as sponsors. Dewesoft immediately stood out to me as different and certainly the most special of them all, even though there were only just over 20 employees at the time. We could see parts of the race cars and photos of the rockets, and then there was a very simple man called Jure who really understood what we were doing with our race cars.
At the time I thought "Maybe Dewesoft would be interesting to work for... one day..." but I wasn't interested in electronics yet, so I quickly abandoned the idea. But I asked Jureto if I could be involved in the real car testing that Dewesoft was doing with its customers. I didn't really count on it, but Jure soon replied with an email. That they were going to visit the Fiat Alfa Romeo test track in Balocco, Italy, and whether I wanted to join them on a two-day trip. With the greatest pleasure! However, the trip coincided with the date of one of my exams, which I had already postponed because of our Formula Student activities, and if I hadn't attended this time I would have had to take it a year later. I explained this to Jureto sadly. Then, to my utter amazement, Jure postponed the meeting with the clients for a week so that I could still join them!
During those two days, I felt what is still to me the most important value of Dewesoft: to be open to everyone at the beginning - and especially to everyone. Jureto didn't have to invite me on this trip, but he did. Dejan and Primož, who also joined, could have given me a feeling of "what are you doing here", but they were totally cool. It was only a few years later that I realised that they were also two of Dewesoft's key people, and certainly two who reflect the company's values and culture.
I then moved to the Netherlands for two years to do a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, but always with the aim of returning to Slovenia. My good friend Bojan was already working at Dewesoft at that time and he approached me to come for an internship. I liked what I saw in Trbovlje: a group of smart engineers moving mountains. Was I good enough to join them after graduation?
RECEIVING A REGULAR SALARY OR BUILDING A BUSINESS
Jureto and I met in the summer of 2015 to discuss possible opportunities together. Jure offered three projects: two were technical positions in an existing Dewesoft company, and the third was related to the creation of a start-up company within Dewesoft to develop and sell low-cost measuring devices. I could choose between a salaried job or a job that was almost free, but with shares in return. I did not even ask what the salary would be.
Jureto's proposal sounded like a dream scenario to me. Dewesoft would provide some funds for development, and I would have to put together a team and find a way to sell the instruments online. If someone had told me then that it would take me four years to get rid of the minimum wage, six years to make the company stable and eight years to make the first major profit ... I might not have chosen this option. I am glad that we never thought about how long it would take, but only about how to achieve it.
EIGHT YEARS OF LEARNING
What have we done in these eight years? The original idea was to build a low-cost measuring device with limited hardware capabilities, and to offer the world's best measurement software with it at no extra cost - the Dewesoft X. We called it MonoDAQ - A single-channel, small Data Acquisition (DAQ) device. Jure already had in mind the concept of building a small device based on the latest available EtherCAT chips. This turned out to be too advanced and still expensive for the low-cost device market. The concept was transformed into a USB device that was actually affordable enough to start testing the market. Unfortunately, even with this concept, the market for low-cost devices turned out to be much smaller than we expected, which made our business model unsustainable.
The biggest problem was that it took us three years and about €300,000 to do it all. The development of both platforms was outsourced to engineers, because we could not afford long-term employment and it was difficult to find people to work in exchange for shares in a company that did not show much potential at the time. This meant that I could only afford one additional permanent team member at that time. Well, it must be a good choice. I worked with many great engineers during my Formula Student years, but most of them, like me, were mechanics-oriented. I needed an electronics engineer, so I had to convince Alex to join the team. Getting him to agree was probably the best achievement of this first triennium.
TEAM BUILDING
But Alex and I were not completely alone. Our biggest fan and supporter was Jure. We also built great relationships with the contract developers we worked with: Žiga, Dušan and Robi from R2DS and Uroš and Tomaž from Isotel. We also had the whole Dewesoft team, starting with Andrei. Maybe not everyone understood what we were trying to achieve and why we were operating as a separate company and not as a division within Dewesoft, but no one ever stood in our way. We got all the help we asked for.
As we had very little business from our main business case - online sales of measuring devices - we had to look for other sources of revenue. During the first three years, we spent at least half of our time on various projects for Dewesoft, for which our company was paid. We were able to spend some of this money on other expenses. We also designed some automated measuring systems for a local steel processing company, which are still in operation today. Although this was something of a waste of our time, as it did little to advance our main objective, it did alleviate some of the financial pressure. External development costs were still covered by Dewesoft, which was of course our majority shareholder.
An important milestone was reached in the third year of operations. Rok Mesar, a successful entrepreneur in search of new challenges, joined our team as Sales Manager, just as he sold his shares in the start-up he co-founded. I admit, we convinced him to join us with some exaggeration about the potential of our company at that time... But how else to convince a natural salesman? 😊 Rok quickly got the products onto online distribution channels and got to know the technical details of our solutions. As we are all interested in learning and understanding different technologies, regardless of prior knowledge, and we like to spend long hours on this, we quickly felt a mutual respect.
Then another member joined us, who is willing to work as long as it takes. This is Tine, who took over the production activities when we finally started selling more machines.
We have gained a lot of knowledge in the first three years of operation. Alex has developed into an excellent all-round hardware and software developer. I have learned a lot about measurement technology and market needs. This has allowed us to quickly create application-specific solutions based on existing hardware and software platforms. One such solution is a MEMS sensor-based tri-axial accelerometer, digitised and integrated into our EtherCAT platform and linked to Dewesoft X software, which is configured for long-term measurements. We were able to create this at very short notice to respond to a specific request from the Sales Director of Dewesoft's Italian subsidiary, Gabriele. This product opened up a whole new market for us: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM).
Online sales did provide some daily cash flow, but it was not enough to allow us to grow. So we started to focus on this solution - measurements to monitor the condition of structures. We realised that thousands of bridges and other structures needed this. As the cost of MEMS sensors came down, a huge market opened up. If we wanted to be part of it, we had to develop fast. And because we were small, it was possible.
FIVE YEARS FOR "OVERNIGHT SUCCESS"
The Italian opportunity in "monitoring" structures took much longer than expected to be a real success (we were used to this by now), but the system of synchronised accelerometers we developed at Gabriele's request has opened many doors, from skyscrapers and offshore wind turbines to mining. This gradually increased our margins, and we could afford to expand our development team with Patrick, who masterfully created our Historian, a server software for long-term data storage. The production team has also grown, with Milan, Žiga and Miha joining at the right time to be ready for the big challenge in 2023: a production capacity of 500 accelerometers per month. And that's thanks to the Italian bridges that were finally equipped with our solutions, five years after the initial negotiations.
In 2023, a team of nine people generated €3 million in revenue, €160,000 in value added per person and a net profit after tax of just under €1 million, which puts our figures per employee at a similar level to the Dewesoft Group as a whole. Following Dewesoft's example, we have also introduced a system of employee co-ownership. Each of our employees can buy shares in the company at book value out of their performance bonuses, and the company has to buy them back at any time, also at book value. We have also renamed the company from MonoDAQ to Dewesoft Monitoringto better reflect our core business.
THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE OF WORKING IN THE DEWESOFT ECOSYSTEM
In the end, the whole idea of setting up a fresh company in close cooperation with a large established company did not make us grow faster, but ensured that we never lost heart and only built our foundations even stronger. Our clients have benefited greatly from our agility, which would not have been possible in a large organisation, and they can feel secure that we will continue to develop and support them in the long term. For me personally, the most important aspect of these eight years with Dewesoft as the majority shareholder of our company has not been the financial support or the existing technology or the brand and global sales network. The most important thing for me was being able to learn from Jureth, Andrew, Tiln, Herbert, Reinhold, Andrew and others, and at the same time being so free to add my own ideas and bring it all together into new solutions for our customers.
We have proven that this model works so far, and we will continue to build sensors, software and all the tools needed to make large-scale monitoring of bridges, wind turbines and other structures as simple and efficient as possible.
He wrote: Dino Florjančič
