What was the context that led to the creation of Sibros?
We started Sibros because both my cofounder and I had a specific car model that received three (almost identical) software-related recalls in the span of 18 months. It baffled us how, in 2018, this problem hadn’t been solved yet when we had solved this problem many years ago when I was at Tesla. I spent many years building the software update system at Tesla in the early days, and they were able to update entire fleets every two weeks. I figured that, seven years later, every car would have an OTA (over-the-air) update feature. This realization was the breaking point that prompted my cofounder and I to create an agnostic, simple solution that could serve all kinds of vehicles, from two-wheelers to passenger cars, trucks and tractors.
What are they key features that make your platform stand out from the crowd?
Most of our leadership team comes from a very deep automotive background from Tesla, Faraday Future, GM and on the cloud side we have the best-in-class specialists that have their roots from Google and Uber. At the end of the day, it is the people that make the difference in a company, but bringing these two very different skill sets together can prove to be a challenging task. Apart from the human resources angle, we are able to provide software updates, data collection and remote diagnostics all in one platform. We have the tools that allow our customers to independently configure what data they want to receive from each vehicle. For example, if the distance between their car and the vehicle in front of it is less than 5 meters, this information can be recorded as an important event. To obtain more relevant results, we are doing all of the processing and filtering on the vehicle and bringing only tiny snippets of data into the cloud.
Many people are wary about data security and privacy. How are you handling these aspects across your platform?
We are extremely conscious that we handle sensitive data. A potential security breach could be the death blow to our company. As a result, we are mitigating risks by staying ahead of any possible threats and we are helping define the regulations in this space. We are inviting white hat hackers and top penetration testing firms to try and break our system so that we may know what are its weak points. Most systems cannot be 100% secure, but we can protect ourselves by making it extremely difficult to be accessed by unwanted parties. Many of the compliances are reduced to simple paper work, so we are constantly doing operational security protocols to make sure we offer the utmost safety to our customers.
How are you funding your efforts and what are your expansion plans for the next few years?
From a funding perspective, we are in a very good position today so if we do fundraise, it will be more opportunistic so as to ensure that we can potentially overcome any future global crisis. We already have a footprint in India, Germany, France, the UK and the U.S. and, as per requirement from a customer which has a global fleet, we will be expanding into China by late summer.
Our scalability can be observed by the number of data points that we collect (which, now, is 30 billion) and not by the number of vehicles in our portfolio.
Lift has a small fleet of e-bikes for which we collect 600 times more data than we would for a typical motorcycle company that is using our platform. Consequently, in our economy, analyzing 1,000 electric bicycles actually amounts to 600,000 vehicles.
Cars are becoming increasingly intelligent, some even comparing them to phones on wheels. What is your take on this idea and how do you envision the future of the automotive industry?
While it takes some of its features from phones, a car is a much more powerful piece of hardware. With EVs coming into the play, we will have big masses of energy that can be moved between the car and the grid, resulting in a generous computing power that could allow us to access various cloud functions. Becoming such powerful machines, cars could do unimaginable things (like bitcoin mining) during their idle times and while connected to renewable energy sources.
Cell Phones receive overnight security fixes that do not require us to go into the store for a software update and they are improving based on the anonymized user data that manufacturers are collecting. With technology improving over time, we are at the point where we can enable all these amazing features into our vehicles. In the same way they use Microsoft Office for their internal documents, all automakers could benefit from the same standard cloud-based platform for their fleet updates. Connectivity will become more commoditized, but what we do with it is more important.
