Sibros Year in Review 2019

Grateful for 2019 and excited for 2020. By Hemant Sikaria, CEO of Sibros

Just over one year ago, we started Sibros with the vision of building a platform and tools to enable the entire connected vehicle ecosystem. We had set up shop in a co-working space in Sunnyvale and were starting to build our products and our team. Starting a new company was tough, and there were a lot of obstacles to overcome in every area.

Very soon after we started, we landed our first customer, who put their faith in us based on our track record of having built large scale systems previously. We had no product yet, so the customer was investing mainly in the capabilities of our team. We were able to hire our first engineer (an old colleague of ours) and an engineering intern from Waterloo and started moving full speed ahead. There was no looking back now, and we were fully committed to our journey.

Over the course of the first year, we learned first hand that building great technology is not enough — it takes real chops to build the foundations for a great company. There are so many facets to building a company, and without proper guidance it is easy to unknowingly go down the wrong path and not see the repercussions until later. Decision making is a key to success, but the hard part is knowing what those decisions are and where to find them. For instance, you can only decide to apply for R&D tax credits if you know that they exist in the first place. Thus, having startup veterans guide us through the process has been crucial to our continued success.

Fast forward one year, we have raised just under $20M in venture capital, expanded our engineering team here in Silicon Valley, established our sales presence in five cities spanning three continents, and built relationships and partnerships with over a dozen customers. We have also launched the Sibros Vehicle Command Center with two of our flagship software solutions which together create a bi-directional data and communication pipe that can be integrated onto any existing or future vehicle. The Deployment Managerprovides our customers with the capability to issue fleet-wide software updates through our web portal, and the Deep Updater on the vehicle facilitates changing the software on every component and sensor deep within the vehicle network. Conversely, the Deep Logger on the vehicle can collect unfiltered, filtered or selective data from the vehicle CAN and Ethernet buses and send it to the cloud where the Datascope on our web portal allows users to study and analyze any data, trends, failures and faults both at the vehicle level and at the fleet level.

We could not have done it without partnering with strategic investors who have opened many doors and been heavily involved in our growth. With every day that passes, we are bridging the gap between the vehicle and the cloud, and between car manufacturers and software. We are creating a 360 view of all vehicle information by stitching together data from manufacturing, service, engineering and customer usage into our automotive cloud platform. The possibilities of what can be achieved with this cross-functional data are endless, and the analytics we have built on top of it have already proven invaluable to our customers. We are happy to say that all of our customers are still with us and a large portion of our growth has been fueled by revenue from customer sales.

Looking back and reflecting on the year that has passed, one word comes to mind: gratitude. Words can hardly express how thankful I am for the hardwork and dedication of the Sibros team, the trust from our investors, guidance from our advisors, and the confidence our customers have placed in us.

We look forward to another great year of fun and fulfillment as we start to make a wider and deeper impact for our customers and the automotive industry as a whole. We hope to continue generating tremendous value for our customers and for the customers of our customers.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Hemant Sikaria, CEO

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