detech.ai – a startup created by two Técnico alumni, is on the shortlist of startups selected to join the Techstars New York City (NYC) accelerator program. Detech.ai is the only Portuguese startup on the list, which also includes 9 more companies based in San Francisco, Washington DC, France, Israel, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The detech.ai members will have access to three months of incubation, which will allow them to a permanent contact with renowned international resources and personalities.
Created in 2006, Techstars NYC is one of Techstars‘ accelerator programs, a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Techstars has funded more than 2,300 startups including companies such as SendGrid, DigitalOcean, PillPack, Outreach. Techstars NYC supports a diverse group of founders with world-class resources, helping them to grow and scale. It has an acceptance rate of 1-2% and receives thousands of applications from around the world.
José Velez, Técnico alumnus, CEO and one of the founders of detech.ai, highlights “we are very proud to join this accelerator program, especially when you consider the large number of startups worldwide that would love to have that same opportunity”. It was great news for the whole team and we were all very motivated to scale the company globally with the support of Techstars mentors” he adds. José Velez stresses “Techstars mentors have already created and scaled several companies worldwide, so they will be extremely important for us, because we will learn and validate our strategy directly from those who have already been in our position”.
Following the incubation period at Startup Lisboa, detech.ai is now in a very important phase of expansion both nationally and internationally. The startup created by José Velez and Tiago Mendes Marques, provides real time autonomous incident & anomaly detection and predictive analytics for IT Operations & DevOps.
A scalable solution that will help to improve IT services
The platform provided by detech.ai will allow companies to monitor IT applications and services as a single one.
“Our product has been very well accepted by the market. It solves a common problem in companies, and the return on investment is very good”, says José Velez. The team currently has 2 pilot projects with Portuguese companies in the Software and FinTech industries. “The aim of these projects is to improve our product based on the feedback from the technical leaders of these companies, so that it is ready to scale”, explains the alumnus.
International companies are also interested in detech.ai’ s platform. “We will soon make our product available to the general market, since we can identify and help solving IT problems, in a reliable and autonomous way using artificial intelligence”, says José Velez. The Técnico alumnus highlights “the platform has a great potential for scalability, since unlike other monitoring platforms, it does not require configuration”. “Our AI models learn their applications’ normal behaviour autonomously, which means that our platform is ready to use and starts creating value once it is used”, he adds.
José Velez became more aware of the complexity of technological applications and services, the difficulty in understanding when they are working properly and the importance of preventing them from failing, when he was working at a solidarity startup aimed at delivering medicines for needy people in Portugal. “I tried to solve this problem using artificial intelligence to learn the normal behaviour of applications. Thus, it was possible to identify and correlate incidents early, autonomously, in companies’ IT operations”, recalls the Técnico alumnus.
“As soon as I had this idea, I proposed EDP to do a proof of concept in one of its critical applications, in order to implement and validate several possible solutions”, he shares. “At the same time, I asked professor Arlindo Oliveira to be my tutor while I was writing my master’s dissertation on this topic”, he adds.
After seeing the potential of his solution, he decided to find a partner: “I presented my idea to Tiago Marques, with whom I had already worked on several projects at Técnico”, recalls José Velez. “We started to build a product and, as soon as we managed to develop an MVP [Minimum Viable Product], we presented the project to some companies in Portugal that showed interest and we started the journey that brought us to where we are today”, says José Velez.
The future looks bright for the Portuguese startup. José Velez believes that, within a decade, ” detech.ai can be alongside the great Portuguese startups, such as Talkdesk and Feedzai, which have become unicorns”. “We will invest strongly in innovation, through technological advances and research in the field of artificial intelligence, in order to automate IT operations in a reliable way and make our product more visible to Fortune 500 companies”.
