Ocell - Data-Driven Natural Resource Management
How would you describe your business idea to a potential investor?
OCELL is a technology platform that enables process optimizations in the industrial forest and farming sector by delivering an entirely new access to aerial imagery and their analysis. OCELL provides partner flight clubs with a sensor technology, which enables them to capture high resolution multispectral imagery. We then use machine learning and computer vision algorithms to extract valuable geo-information from this data.
This unlocks previously inaccessible opportunities of process optimization for our customers.
One example for a process that we can automate entirely is the forest stock taking, which is used to determine the overall stock volume of a forest estate. While this traditionally takes 50 employees more than six weeks of manual labour in the forest, OCELL can do it in less than a week and for half the price.
With 65% of the overall German land area being utilized by the farming and forest industry, the market potential for Germany alone exceeds two Billion Euros per year.
What problem do you want to solve, what is your goal?
As of today, there is no economical solution for industrial farming and forest holdings to include aerial geo-data into their management processes even though the insights hidden in this data has a tremendous potential for process optimizations. The reason for this is, that there is no economical solution for these customers to capture and process aerial geo-data. Satellites lack the resolution needed for forest applications and the reliability needed for industrial farming processes and drones are unable to cover large industrial farming and forest areas economically. A drone e.g. can cover 10–15ha/h for around 50€, while a pilot that uses our sensor technology in an Ultralight Aircraft can do >5000ha/h for around 120€. The resulting price/ha is >100x cheaper. Our goal is to achieve a major market share in the multi-billion Euro industrial forest and farming service market in which we are currently testing our service with pilot customers.
How did you come up with your idea/concept?
The multiple ideas behind OCELL were born from numerous private meetings and discussions prior to our founding. We first started out using drones as a sensor carrier but soon realized that this technology faces severe deficits regarding flight performance and operations. Our customers have confirmed these disadvantages, so we came up with our concept, which allows us to generate high quality geo-data in an efficient way. The idea of generating insights of aerial data accessible to a large number of customers was then transformed to a working prototype and by now we were able to prove to our first customers, that we offer a superior solution compared to what is available on the market today.
What is your business model?
OCELL has a platform-based business model that allows our industrial farming and forest customers to subscribe to our geo-information service online and on demand. We then manage everything from data capturing to the processing and visualization of the results. Our partner flight clubs are provided with the sensor technology and compensated for capturing the raw data.
Why did you decide to work with XPRENEURS?
XPRENEURS was recommended to us by several teams of the former batches. We heard about the valuable lessons, workshops and networking opportunities the program offers. Especially topics such as legal advice or business model development helped us sharpening our concept. We are now looking forward towards raising our Seed Investment Round in the upcoming months. If you are interested in investing in OCELL please make sure to contact us.
You can get more information about Ocell on their website or on LinkedIn.
You want to become part of the XPRENEURS incubator program as well?
Get more information and apply at https://xpreneurs.io/.