Their products help travelers and businesses to make quick decisions when it comes to choosing somewhere to visit
Bio
Age of business: 23 months
Name of business: Avuxi
Location: London & Barcelona
Team: Alexis Batlle, Roberto Abril, Oriol Romero, Jose Rodriguez, Kate Hubchyk, Geeshan Willink
Funding: €100,000
What does Avuxi do?
AVUXI has created a ranking of the popularity of every place on Earth. Our products help travelers and businesses to make quick, correct decisions when choosing a location.
Where did the business idea come from?
As chief executive of a mobile payments company operating in five countries, Alexis had to travel a lot, often on a short notice. He always wanted to stay in the best possible area in a new city, to experience it at its best. But figuring out where the hotspots were was always difficult and time consuming. So the idea was born to create a solution that would harvest the existing collective knowledge of people and offer carefully balanced, instant insights, visualised.
Are you working with any other partners?
We started at Startupbootcamp in Berlin at a very early stage. That time helped us to clarify the business we needed to build. Then we spent some time at Telefónica’s accelerator Wayra in Barcelona, where we built our core product with worldwide coverage, and ran several pilots. Winning a contest and cooperating with KAYAK was also very valuable. It helped us polish our first products to meet the high standards required by global industry leaders.
How has ODINE helped you so far?
ODINE has been very valuable in providing guidance and financing our R&D efforts. This helped us to finally start working on a product we have been exploring for quite a while: Social Neighborhoods. Our goal is to uncover the socio-economical structure of cities, making instantly visible the actual profiles of different areas within a city. Imagine understanding a city you’ve never been before with one glance.
What advice would you give to other companies pitching to ODINE?
Try to make your case very clear. Answer as shortly and clearly as possible these questions: Why your project is valuable? How large is the problem it solves? How is it innovative? How will it be turned into a business? Last, but not least: Why you?
How would you encourage big business to buy into the open data movement?
Data is the oil of this century. Everything is based on data. The more open data is made available and used, the more possibilities for big businesses to thrive, uncover their full potential and find new revenue streams.
What’s the key trend in open data at the moment?
From our point of view it is in the cross referenced analysis of different datasets to generate new insights and extract more value from the data. However, there’s still very much to be done developing a structured, international open data ecosystem.
(This article first appeared on the Guardian)
