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Incari wants to be the OS for the cars of the future
We make the design process of user-friendly interfaces in cars easier. … we can reduce the production time from almost 4 years to 18 monthsOsman Dumbuya, CEO and founder Incari
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We will disruptively change the understanding of operating systems.Osman Dumbuya, CEO and founder Incari
The Founder
Today we bring you the interview with Osman Dumbuya (https://www.linkedin.com/in/osman-dumbuya/), the CEO and founder of Incari (https://www.incari.com/). They create the required tools and technologies, necessary for developing future-based HMI systems (human-machine interface) in the automotive and other industries. He has a fascinating story, being born in Sierra Leone and immigrating with his parents to Germany, spending most of his life in Berlin. He has always been fascinated by 3D visualizations, for example early on by spaceships.
The Startup
Incari (https://www.incari.com/) is a software provider, founded in Berlin, May 2011. Currently, they are mostly working on interfaces for the automotive industry but want to develop further into an operating system for the interfaces of cars. Their system is already used by brands like Audi, Bugatti, and Porsche.
What you have in hardware in your car is not comparable to your PC or even smartphone. The hardware is much less powerfulOsman Dumbuya, CEO and founder Incari
Venture Capital Funding
A recent investment round of 15 mn Euros, led by Lukasz Gadowski. We had him in the interview, you can learn more about him here
The Video Interview is set to go live on Thursday, October 7th, 2021 at 17.00 CET
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Further Readings
Human Machine Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface
DOS operating system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
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The Interviewer
This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:
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Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:08] That I owe you were podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startups.With News interviews and Live Events,hello and welcome everybody in this is Joe from startupradio your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany bringing you anotherinterview more or less from the automotive space but the first I would like to welcome US money hey how you doing I’m fine.
[0:38] Thanks for having me I am delighted to be here.It’s totally my pleasure and we may add that you guys are.
[0:50] Working a little bit in the automotive space but we will get to this.Pretty soon can you first tell us a little bit about what you did in your life before and how it make you an entrepreneur,well I was born particularly and Sierra Leone so this is where I spent the first five years of my life before we migratedto Germany and since we are in Germany.I grew up most of the time until then I studied in Berlin.And studied computer science and I always wanted to work in the field of computer visualization so I’m.I’m a big Star Trek fan so being in the teenage years I always was a very.Yeah fund of how the the spaceships look like and how they were designed and I wanted to recreate things like this on a computer.So the size of was how I started to get into 3D visualization in general starting with 3D Studio.
[2:06] And it wasn’t see Studio.
[2:11] 4.0 I think that was the one dose before it was became 3D Studio Max and it then started to run on Windows here.
[2:21] I I just had to smile because my first hint was for everybody who doesn’t know what does is I’ll link it down here in the show notes,you’re now smiling but actually I once told somebody augmented reality it’s like the Terminator when he sees this red writing a scroll through his vision and the other one saidI’m afraid I’m too young for thisso totally linked this down here in the show notes and the second question would be you were also one of the guys who watch Star Trek after school right in the afternoon.
[2:57] Yeah are you high was one of those guys yeah running home to it to watch next next Generation right admittedly me too.
[3:06] It was was very inspiring and always very exciting.I know this is a this is a very difficult question to answer but what’s the best Star Trek series would you like most the original the Next Generation Deep Space 9 J way.I think I’m I’m really a great fan of DS9 because of the complexity of the story and and how much they go into depth of,educating about the different cultures and the different races and that story but they’re also yeah brought up a lot of.Interracial conflict whether it’s religious based or racially based so basically they discuss a lot of things that we are facing in real life.
[3:55] And and that that was quite interesting the way the way they.Told the story of the S9 and I think that’s one of the best Star Trek TV series TV shows there.
[4:09] Okay and and now we have to get this bridge how did you get from from visualizing awesome fancy faster than like spaceships.To something like mundane like interfaces in cars How would how did this happen how did you downgrade that’s that’s a long story but,to keep the long story short basically it’s like don’t worry you can tell a long story on our Channel that’s what we’re here for don’t worry.Well okay let’s take it step by step so after finishing my studies of course I had to find a job and I’ve always wanted to work in the filament Industry Show realize that.
[4:57] The great visuals that we were familiar with and movies and that time.When I finish my studies around 2004.There were a lot of great projects which were being produced all over the world whether it’s Lord of the Rings or Star Wars Harry Potter you know different locations but all all over the place very exciting.
[5:22] And I applied for some of those projects and I also get accepted but.There was second very important topic for me and that was basically not really to leave my.My home country Germany and so,I denied the the job offers I had abroad and decided to move to Munich to accompany quote rtt where I learned a complete different,way of understanding visualization in the more Industrial Way so creating visuals and the movie industry is more like.It just has to be aesthetic.Especially at that time and it has to look the way people expecting but when you do visualizations for the industrial base they are expectations of physical accuracy.And the fertilization has to be correct in some type of measures that you need to interpret interpret interpret what you’re seeing on the screen right so that it has some real life means.And meanings that people can evaluate to True construct stuff and that case it was cars so.Having this understanding and learning and the company rtt how what what this basically means for for improvement of production.
[6:49] I was completely overwhelmed and and found this idea very intriguing so I wanted to learn more about this and,but I at that time probably I was a bit too pushy but the development that attitude didn’t went fast enough for my point of view so.And I hid the lecture to team up with two other guys and we had some materials who had the pace and so we started the company.Really great real-time visualization and created the software that helped people in the industry to.Visualized very quickly very accurately we.They built in an application real time Ray tracing which even.Racist accuracy by tracing life race and casting Shadows visualizing gaps between.Big parts were able to analyze.Colors very accurately measurable colors the light distribution of headlights for example when you when you look at cars so,their world really good long list of features that were,able with that we were able to build an hour application to allow people to do certain measurements and Analysis.
[8:12] Which are applicable to real life physical,and that really changed my mind staining of how capable a computer can be and since then I always wanted to,work on software Technologies which being usable in real life products that can become everyday.Mmm tools right that people are using it for everyday use a coming from that first company we had the lecture to sell it at some point it’s all to this.But at that time I already had founded the second company which I’m working now and Carries gmbh and.There in the beginning we also started with services but from some point I really wanted to go back to to software development and,and Technology development so this is how we then started to to develop tools and solutions for hmis and cars,that that’s basically the story how I went from movie visualization to visit ization for your product.
[9:21] What when you’ve been telling this story a few things flash to my mind at firstoh your apartment has to be very interesting if you’re all about visuals secondly I imagined you on your first work day designing something really fancy look I made it art decokeep it functional Osman keep it function it in Turkey and I was wondering if he would have,if you would have the choice of doing like some,animation CGI stuff right now or from the past what would it have been.
[9:57] What is the most fascinating like special effects that you’ve seen that you would have loved to do yourself.
[10:10] Admittedly my personal favorite is is Pixelmon do Game of Thrones that dragons.Yeah there I think there’s so many extremely talented people nowadays around for doing really great visuals you know it always depends on on what you want to focus on because I think,yeah seen dragons is of course a very interesting visual to to see it in a way that it,that you believe that it’s real and let that that it gives you the impression of being real footage but I think there are also people who are creating characters.Faces which already looks so real which is really breathtaking and.But of course what’s what’s attracting the most right now is when I look at shows.TV Serie that I love very much as the expense.
[11:11] And and they are creating so great visuals in terms of interface designs that they’re showing during the TV show series that’s pretty impressive because,there’s so much thought into their designs you know it’s not just the visual that looks good but it’s also,interface design that has functional means that you understand how it’s supposed to work if it was real.And this I think is really very very impressive visualization they all think they are.
[11:46] Always always always I was asking this question for a very simple reason because I just now want to ask and now you bringing this expense.Into the normal cars how does it work in Woody guys actually doing now because my understanding is you first,had a company together with partners and out of this you created in curry the company we currently talking about is that about right.That’s about right but incari had a different purpose so the first company was supporting the virtual prototyping process by.By offering tools to examine Concepts on a digital base before you start building up a physical prototype because it’s simply saves a lot of money.
[12:38] And using our tool at that time very red.Gave the users really a huge palette of tools to really examine a lot of different,use cases where that’s a package as I said Colin Trim Light and side analysis so these were really,range of functionalities which needed to be examined before or saves you a lot of money money if you can examine this before you start to build up a physical prototype,running that company we needed more people to support our customers on the service level so that’s basically the reason why we created the incari,M to build up a service company to have,let’s support us to have our customers and peak times but after we sold the company by end of 2012 there was really not.There was no more a real used for us to support the technology on the server side.So but we still went on with us for another two years and then in 2014.I bumped into this topic that it might make sense for future cars to reinvent the the architecture of interfaces.
[14:02] Compared to the interfaces cars are using right now at that time especially which is already now six years back so there we had to solve a range of.Of issues because the the hardware which are which is being built into cars is not comparable with what you have on your PC let’s has less resources less memory slow UPS CPUs.
[14:32] Not really high end graphic boss.So you don’t really have a lot of Hardware resources but still there’s an expectation that the visual representation Tatian that you’re creating has to be top-notch a state-of-the-art.And we all know how long are pixels when during a single image for movie for example yeah but I want to I don’t know can you tell them fizzle ization of your time.How long does this Pixar take for the rendering of such a visualization becauseI don’t know why I I’m an amateur here I don’t even do good video editing sorry well let me put on my channel it’s not against hexa theyfor sure have have even more are requirements on the images but generally when you rent Wing images.
[15:21] You have certain amount of frames per second so when you look at two games for example which is more comparable in general a game rendering,then you can achieve like 60 frames per second and more complex game or at least 30 frames per second so we have to,do this same amount of rendering every second.But on a much lower Hardware resources minimal Hardware resources which are being used in the and the car industry but the expectation of the visual quality has to be similar like whatpeople are used to on games so there we had to figure out how can we achieve this by optimizing our software solution but,that’s just one part of the problem of course to generate a great output if you have a great artist to create the visualization but,we also have to offer or create the right tooling for the different departments at the Enterprises to,to get to these results because they have to build it at the end into a car and therefore they have to stick to certain processes from the design.
[16:37] To the quality assurance to the engineering,yeah to the international internet legislation of getting all the languages for specific are you know we just you don’t just build a car in a single language you have to translate it to all the other languages so these are certain steps that you have to take,and,we wanted to offer all these tools these people need to have a streamlined process.From starch and to start from the complete conceptual phase of a designer who’s inventing.On an artistic level how the cockpit could look like.
[17:19] And at the end we had to ensure that this conceptual design can end up in the car with the dedicated Hardware,which is being built into the car and without losing qualityand in between yours no have to have the the user experience because I have Painful experience for example with the car of my wife I’m not going to tell what color it is but I failed repeatedlyjust to get the there’s a function to pick up the phone and stuff like this just to Fay faileddisconnect the Bluetooth from this very new cell phone to the car because it’s just so over complicated nobody really knows how it actually has to go so.It’s just me but that’s.That’s almost nobody’s fault even though it’s bad and but what it’s hard to point to anyone to say that person was did the mistake because it’s more the process that’s causing these issues yeah so the designers are probably inventing a very smart,interface design and also ux concept to to address all the tools and the functionality is in the car but then when the process moves on to engineering then they are using completelydifferent set of tools where they can’t want to run convert the conceptual design into productive solution.
[18:43] There’s a disconnect,and due to the different type of soil to set they using they can’t replicate that in the same way the designer has initially created it so this is how these type of,and every tating results can can occur due to the existing process and we wanted to solve this by offering a tool which can be used consistently,from the designers until to the engineers who are building the stuff into the car because,they are they can all rely on the same data structure on the Thames same to set on the time functionalities and the same features which are embedded in the tool so the conceptual design that the designer has created,he can be sure that this design can be built into the car one to one without losing any any creativity.
[19:39] I see and so basically what you guys are doing you make the design of user-friendly cars.Easier would that be the bottom line.
[19:52] Initially we make the deal the the creation of the design process we make that easier.And also the integration.
[20:04] Into the final product it’s much easier with our tool and and the whole process becomes much more streamlined so we did some benchmarking,we were able to evaluate that we were able to reduce the production time from almost four years to 18 months justoptimizing the process so I said it’s not always the people in the process who are causing the issues of in some cases are many cases often just the general process pipeline how it works which are causing the problems and,We Believe by creating the right tooling and the right digital Solutions.That there’s a huge potential of process optimization.And streamline the development time and process in general of product creation.
[20:56] When I look now at you web site companies you work with as it appears that is usedin the premium segment I’ll see here all the Bugatti Porsche but also skoda and VW apparently you have already found some pretty,good customers plus you definitely found some Investments right.
[21:22] Yeah these are two points but I have to correct it a bit so yeah the list of customers we have is correct these are all companies who are working with very closely.But it’s not always in the term ofI cook the design so we in the past we did some services so they are also some connections to these customers and by doing some services for thembut we are working with more and more people and.Cockpit design a development and our cab companies getting more traction in that field.
[22:05] Yeah but but the companies he just named most of them are within the Volkswagen a trend.So these are all companies which are very close to each other right so Lamborghini is the daughter of Audi Audi is part of Volkswagen.Porsche is called and said so.If you have good contacts within folks wagon then of course it’s not that hard to also work for different folks wagon daughters,yeah and and we had the luck early this year to gain.Strong investor who believe in our work and Trust in our quality and our talents and invested a huge amount of money into our work,which helps us to really improve grow the team improve our development speed and,enter even stronger our growth period of selling deploying our products supporting customers and helping with integration.And building up more tools to make development time quicker and a more seamless for the user.
[23:20] And we may add that lead investor was Lucas kotowski with his team global.For everybody who doesn’t know him there will be a link down here in the show notes because at the time of the publication of this interview we already published interview together,with him that’s that he not only invested in you because he shortened the development time of theinterfaces in,cars but you also moving more and more towards developing an operational system for cars is that true.
[23:58] That’s absolutely right so starting with with the development of,basically a desktop solution to have the workers at an OM at him car manufacturer to optimize their own working process we also recognize that most of them,we’re not sure which type of software basic software operating systems they should put on these embedded boards to to have the whole system running.
[24:28] And in our first prototype that we are building up we always bumped into that issue that we had long discussions about which type of.M operating system should be used.So that we decided then by 2017 to solve this topic on our own and provide operating system sooner or later to our customers,so that they have a basic operating system,that they can rely on and can be sure that if they have that one deployed on their embedded system that our system our application then dashboard can run on that operating system sothis is how the idea kind of came up on our side and then we started to investigate which which topics will be have to solve twobuild up a solid operation operating system which issues might come up and how can we.Mmm Yeah,the keep maintenance of that operating system and and where’s the market potential of course this is all things we always have to do an advance before we start putting resources on that type of a development.
[25:43] But doing so.We really recognize that there’s a huge potential for for more than just the common operating systems I know there’s a range of people who are looking into this but you really have to define the.Your target audience that you want to provide this technology to and whatthe benefits of that type of operating system has to be and we think that there’s a huge need in the automotive industry,even beyond the automotive in C so this is why we started to,to put this effort into developing an operating system and we think that it’s really important that the.Is sooner or later such as solid and sophisticated operating system which is based in Europe to really give you a PN,Enterprises in alternative,system that they can rely on with a different type of business model ever with a different understanding of privacy and data ownershipthen the American provide us all thing so this is why we see a huge potential there to to,find a great Market entry with with our solution when it’s ready.
[27:00] We’re talking about the operating system of a car we don’ttalk about like one size fits all I assume you have a certain area of cars you looking at you develop your operating system for I cannot really imagine thata big truck somewhere in a coal mine would run on the same operating system as for example a high-end sports car.
[27:27] Well they can there’s there’s not really a need to make a difference.But of course we the system via building will always be a customizable in a certain level so,it will only support the necessary,libraries and drivers and functionalities which are necessary for that specific Hardware so it’s a very Dynamic set up of operating system so if you say you.
[27:54] You sit in the track that doesn’t have any driver assistant features like ABS ESP.M or GPS USB connection then of course you don’t need the software packages which are needed to support these type of hardware.M elements but if you are building something up which is has all these type of things like a luxurymmm sedan then of course the operating system we will deploy will support all these features too,make of functions complete what would be.The type of aspects would Age it just for me and my audience to understand what you need to take care of if you have acars operating system doesn’t make a difference if it’s an electric vehicle if it’s a combustion engine if it’s gasrun,engine meaning actual gas or all the aspects of security running the car,plus the emergency assistance programs plus of course entertainment I think there’s like a big bottle of things you have to take care of right.
[29:22] Well I have to clarify something at this point in the car there’s not just one computer system or just one operating system running so this is something that has to be.The kid in the van so the car basically a several layers where different players involved in.And we are what we are offering is the main machine interface right so where our role is is not on really safety critical path of the car.This this has been done by other people we are taking care of the communication between the car and the driver so the signal that the.Driver is receiving from the car or signal that the driver setting for the car to change certain parameters but.
[30:12] Of course also on that level we have some safety topics that we have to take care of in Terms of red
undancy.Fail-safes that we have to make sure that there’s a.
[30:28] The second system that can launch with almost no resources just to give the basic signals if there’s a engine if the engine is broken or.The light indicator yeah but we are not involved in like the the ESP interaction so that’s a different system running there.So we don’t have to take care of all or safety measures which are built in a car and we don’t have to take care of all sorts of legal requirements which are necessary to get a car,up and running on the street,but we have to take care of of course all the legal requirements which are necessary for our part and the car and that’s basically really the interaction between man and machine.
[31:19] I see so basically,to get it really really shortened basically you do the you get the data all the information to everything the,user the driver of the car or maybe the passengers are actually seeing red.
[31:41] Exactly so part of this is also the infotainment says he said multimedia if you want to play music if you want to watch a movie.Yeah so so these are things which have to be solved by our application.And these are interfaces or applications that you can build within our application so you can actually create your own movie player with your own design.With your own look and feel how you want it to appear in the car you can create your own radio.System with all the different channels.So you can steam all the data you’re getting a type of list of raw data there’s some things we can provide in our application and then you can Define Howard,should be represented interface wise in the car but we are also doing is to get all the signals or the status of our signals and sensors in the car like.And if you have your headlight beams on.Of course we have to know that they are ons so show you that there on that activated for example if you have your left or right indicator on we have to get the signal.And what we also control is like the HVAC to climate control or seat position if this can be digitally manipulated.
[33:04] So all these type of things we do have access to them but if it becomes really safety-critical then we out of this.Two questions.First you have to build a tea that people or developers can build on your platform is it something that you would have something like an app store in your software and secondly.
[33:30] At this point we can be very sure that startupradio the channel and the podcast will be available in your system as a standard delivery right.
[33:39] Sooner or later I guess I’m afraid we will have to take care of this very soon but we have it on record we have it but but seriously the,basically the architecture of our software set up in a way that you are getting a full SDK visually based so you’re getting all tools to create any type of.
[34:06] Application that you want to create and what’s very important about our tooling the focus of.Of of this tool is to make it easily accessible for people who are not suffer experts like a designer.Who is he has learned to be creative and to be inspiring and to reinvent.The design of products and and visuals so that’s his expertise.But they have to work with computer systems to Define how things going to look like in the future without having the knowledge.To build a functionally the way they want to visualize it at the end so we have to,reduce the complexity of the it infrastructure to make it accessible to these type of people that they can really be creative and create what they think is appropriate.
[35:09] And this is why we decided to provide a set of or to provide.The programming capabilities in terms and and form of nodes that people can connect certain notes which are very logically built so if you have a.Logic understanding of dependencies you can connect these notes in a certain row and then you,make them functional and at the other hand you have certain outputs where you can directly communicate with machines whether it’s canvas weathers mqtt so we have certain type of communication,communication protocols that you can address of course HTML HTTP and thereby control other products other machines are the signals and received them and sent them to,two Motors to execute certain functionalities I see,you talked about simplification in the just one more topic I want to discuss before we get into with the Outlook and the closing of the interview with.I found that you have a very interesting pricing model on your website because I’ve read 13 US dollars per client and that sounds to me like.
[36:36] You either expect like a sicilian of car designers or the pricing is a little bit different than people imagine when they first look at your website.
[36:47] One more basically the pricing of start different than what you have seen that that’s that’s the price that we are asking even though the technology is really detect and very complicated but we don’t want to,make people be afraid of of developing their own product and developing their own tools and developing their own software be inviting themand this is why we are having the price tag solo to give people easily access to to realize the ideas.But where we want to have a bit of participation is at a later stage because when you deploy our product into when you deploy our,our software solution to a product then there’s licensing model which asks for licensing fee per unit that you’re selling.
[37:41] And depends on the volume the price is going lower and lower so this gives the both parties enough leeway to make their revenues.
[37:51] Ah I see see see and you talked about the deployment like in the future what do you feature plans from here onout because we talked about a little bit about the operation system side and from what you said I deduce it’s not ready yet.
[38:12] While we expect to have our first with these band of this year hopefully if everything works for works out well and this will,yeah then we will present it also on.
[38:25] Some happy we’re designing to give people a real good impression about what we expect how,operating system should look like in the future and how they spread function and we by end of this year we will give you more detailed insight about how how it looks like because we believe that we,well disruptively change the understanding of operating system compared to how they are being understood now,so I guess that’s going to be a small surprise for all of you but it’s not going to take too long anymore by end of this year we’ll be ready to show your,what what’s going to what you can expect from us for future.Depending on other circumstances like Corona and maybe beginning of next year but whenever you’re ready for it,let us know and of course we’ll get an update here in our blog post,everybody who would like to learn more you can go down here in the show notes there is of course a link to the LinkedIn profile of a smart as well as a link to the company’s website.Ozma.Thank you very much it was just a play having you here you’ve been a little bit nervous at the beginning by the we’re recording now for almost 40 minutes and you did very well thank you very much I really enjoyed the interview.
[39:50] Thank you for having me that was pleasure for me to thank you very much.
[40:00] Music.
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