Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives recently sat down with Joni Hoppen, Director of Internationalization at Aquarela Analytics. He explained his company’s expertise in AI.
Safety Detectives: What motivated you to start your company?
Joni Hoppen: One of the reasons we started the company was to develop high-tech technologies in Brazil. I was studying in the Netherlands, and my partner was also completing his master’s degree. We noticed that larger organizations in Brazil had big issues in bringing innovations to their own settings, so we developed and thought about a company that could help them from outside at a much more stabilized rate. For the past 11 years, we have developed more than 70 solutions for the Brazilian Industry using advanced AI algorithms. Recently, Aquarela Analytics received a national award in Brazil as the best solution for industry amongst 2500 competitors, this shows the maturity level of our business.
SD: Can you tell me about your company’s services?
JH: We have services that are oriented to large organizations in different sectors. We have clients in the aerospace industry, energy, healthcare, agriculture, and telecommunications. Our systems are mostly focused on providing artificial intelligence answers to complex business intelligence systems that only provide monitoring which is already useful but not enough. We provide insights that are generated by technology and by the computer itself based on multisector datasets such as retail, climate, and others. Dynamic pricing is also one type of solution that is very relevant for us. We are dynamic pricing across the country. Some of these global companies are already bringing these solutions abroad to Latin America and Europe. Some other services include very intense research and development strategies and technologies that we create together with the client.
SD: What makes your company unique?
JH: What makes Aquarela different is the rate of successful projects. Usually, if you look at the AI markets, the statistics have shown that more than 90% of AI and data analytics projects fail. We are changing this situation to have 90-95% of success. Besides that, we also have a high attraction of talent. Every time we need more people to work with us, we pick the best in class in most of the universities nationwide.
In addition, the technology itself is much more precise, and we can do things faster than the competitors.
SD: How does your company deal with cybersecurity?
JH: We have policies that are connected to compliance as Aquarela Analytics has large investors like Embraer, for instance. We are obliged and obligated to have strict policies in terms of work ethics and the usage of systems. Just to give you an example, we have a policy that every single computer has to have the hard disk fully encrypted. We have everything classified with a very strict set of rules for dealing with passwords. Most of our solutions are connected to the best cloud computing solutions as well. All the best practices are strictly used, especially because we work with our clients’ data. Very sensitive data pass through our systems, and we are very aware of the risk. We invest in technologies, processes, policies, and also cloud computing technologies.
SD: How is the pandemic affecting your industry?
JH: The pandemic has changed the speed at which we have to close deals, which has become much faster. As we provide the solution for complex problems in the food industry, aerospace, automotive, and so on, we have all the components that are ready to use and easy to install. The pandemic has sped up the process in our sales process, so for us, especially, it has been very positive. We would do the same thing that we are doing today without the pandemic, but it would take four or even five years to reach the same point that we are at right now.