Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels

Sustainability and efficiency are essential for tomorrow’s livestock farming. Improving animal health and reducing antibiotics usage are some of the targets in that context. Timely stopping the spread of infectious diseases through the herd or region is equally important. Altogether, regular monitoring and earlier detection of livestock threats are crucial.

We offer a specialized, customizable and open platform for versatile data collection from sensors and instruments, with analysis, dashboards and remote diagnosis possibilities for vets, labs, milk processors and animal health specialists.

Project history and advice to start-ups:

Our key business partner has more than 16 years experience in instrument manufacturing. That business partner is not a software company: while they have worldwide success with their hardware products, they can logically not answer all the market needs, especially for software-based solutions in today’s complex and fast evolving digital world. That’s why our project was launched. Our project is in a sense similar to a “spin-out”. It’s the result of 16 years of in-depth involvement in milk quality and animal health, in 44 countries. As a separate structure (company), we have more opportunity to grow, with less bandwidth constraints into directions of our choice, in a vendor-agnostic way and with a dedicated team. These characteristics make our project unique in this eco-system.

Being unique and having strong and experienced business partners with a solid track record is very important for every project. As we notice, it’s a shortcut to get in touch with large and small players - potential clients and partners, and to bag contracts. Several of these players are used to do business with our close partners, so there is a mutual trust.
Similarly important for any undertaking, are the advisers and colleagues around you. In our case, I was already working with many of the advisers and colleagues before we started this project, so we know each other. Of course we have to complement our “familiar” team with a few “external” persons who are rather new to the team, taking into account our technological focus.

Current challenges:

Our sales pipeline of leads and opportunities is filling up well; from a technical point of view we can also rely on IT professionals we are working with since several years. However, finding the right sources of financing is challenging. In order to be able to conclude a number of contracts and succeed in bigger client-projects, we need a financial push. Such accessible support is also needed in order to develop technically and in-depth certain platform modules. After all, animals are going digital, who will manage the digital herd?

www.animalmonitoring.com

Value of the MIC Boostcamp:

During the MIC Boostamp we got inputs from experts, for instance on our marketing
collaterals and budget estimations. The MIC Boostcamp was also a meeting place for the local entrepreneurial community. I’m grateful to the experts who freed their time and shared their valuable insights.