Henry Uyeme, Founder, intrida

 How did intrida get started?

I sat through many technical meetings, reference groups and retrospectives of complex projects around the world and saw first-hand how a large number of technical challenges could have been easily solved or avoided if teams had easy access to the visuals, variety of data and associated information across entire projects. Information was siloed within projects—even with a wide array of data authoring tools to generate datasets, they usually carry little, if any, context and don’t easily allow for beneficial collaboration. 

We found, through several months of research, that many organizations still depended on convoluted ways of interacting with their data and time-consuming methods of validating their data sets, most of which were manual. After organizations lacked the ability to acquire sufficient insights from shared data to power informed decisions throughout their projects, they had to resort to ‘reworking’ the entire project. 

We built a technology platform that unified and validated data to allow for seamless collaboration. We worked hard to make the technology intuitive and ‘easy’ to work with while maintaining reliability and robustness.

Can you explain what “intelligent data” is and why it is so important?

The issues I’ve described above, created by the era of big data and digitalization, where there are vast datasets with no context or sharing capabilities, creates what’s called “dumb data,” where the underlying information isn’t useful or just isn’t there.

Intelligent data includes data points that carry relevant contexts that can support the extraction of the best value when generating insights. This helps guide informed decisions.

In an article in Chenected in April, you said intrida was in the seed stage of funding. Can you tell us where it’s at now?

We are currently fundraising for our seed round. 

In the beginning, we chose to focus entirely on developing a platform prototype, also known as a Minimum Viable Product.

We faced a few challenges in earlier conversations with angel and institutional investors. They didn’t seem to have a clear understanding of the problems we were trying to solve or the solutions we were providing. Maybe we were speaking to the wrong kinds of investors? (Those who weren’t in the engineering/chemicals/process space) or perhaps because we were too technical in the articulation of our solution’s concepts and its benefits to non-tech civilians? 

Because we focused on developing the MVP and demonstrating its capabilities to select enterprises, we’ve been able to confirm agreements for pilot projects within these organizations. We believe locking in some of these key customers for pilots gives us added advantages when we negotiate for our seed raise.

What were the pivotal moves and decisions that contributed to where intrida is today?

In the early days, we ran a customer validation exercise where we spoke to individuals across disciplines in numerous process and chemical organizations. Our findings led us to revamp about 50 percent of our early technology ideas and pivot. We nearly rewrote all of our product definition and development strategies.

Who have been your biggest supporters along the way?

Our technology partners have been our biggest support on this journey. They believed in ideas scribbled on paper and PowerPoint slides, they saw us through initial prototypes and beta builds of our flagship platform. Their support helped increase our credibility and validate our solution concepts and helped us progress out of the planning phase.

Early adopter customers who listened to our suggestions of systems which could dramatically improve how they validate, interact and collaborate on their technical data worked with us by implementing this within their infrastructure, which was a big support.

Our fan base also includes a small but growing number of our global team members, friends and family who battled on with us through the wildly challenging moments.