HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I have lots of titles as an entrepreneur. I am a technical solo female founder. This is how the ecosystem defines me. I define myself as a passionate one. I want to save human life. This is all about my startup spirit.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
It is called Xena Vision. We are a computer vision-focused deep tech startup. We employ tech to save human lives in the case of an emergency. The system acts as an independent warrior who fights to save you by detecting your situation and asking for help by alarming. Our focus is violence detection, heart attack, fall, car accident detection, and prevention by real-time video analytics.
What is the origin story?
The story began in France, Nice, on the 14th of Jun 2016. I was a master's student in Nice Univesity in Theoretical Computer Science and working in Inria as a research intern on video activity recognition. At the same time, I attended a 15 days Entrepreneurship Bootcamp called EIA.
Students from Berkeley, Nice, and all around the world, we were about to conclude great MVPs. That day a terrible terrorist attack happened in Nice, and 83 people lost their lives; and 3 of them were our friends of Bootcamp. I was broken into pieces, and afterward, I wanted nothing more than to save people.
I am a computer engineer with expertise in Activity Recognition. So that I have the power to convert any camera to an intelligent one to capture emergencies, this is how the story begins. In 2018 I launched my startup dedicated to this project with national R&D Institution Funding by being selected into 140 out of 4500.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
We are great together! So young, so energetic, so impatient! We are sensitive and care for each other. We have no fixed hours on the team. No pressure and no intolerance. First, we care for each other in the team. By performing this each day, we develop a product that cares for human life, safety and security. We learn a lot! We are bright enough to believe that the world can become a much better place, so that we work by heart to make it happen. We dedicate our most important asset to this project. It is our time and dedication at a young age.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I have professional experience in sports volunteer management. I lead 2 times international workcamps of 20 people for almost a month. Probably I could be preparing to launch my own startup and practicing voluntary management along with my profession as a full-time worker.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Our primary metric is our customer satisfaction.(Saving Lives). The secondary one is traction. The third one could be the number of customers obtained for the period. Of course, customer persistence.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Hearing Wows from executives. They are motivated to support and suggest the product. We work with our biggest enterprises locally.
What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why?
We develop our own activity recognition algorithms and models. The most exciting part is the involvement and interest in AI. There is a great growing audience. The most challenging part for us was to show our customers that our system is not like an ordinary system for people identity tracking. We are fully focused on events and unwanted happenings. We collect data in an anonymous way. We are not interested in personalized information. All we want is to create every corner of a city secure by detecting abnormal events in a real-time manner. This is so new that we applied the patent for our system. Changing their perception to be watched is challenging even though we won’t.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
Great place to be in as the audience is technologists.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
It’s all worth it.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
Being an idealist, desiring to change the world and never stop creating innovation, if these are all about your personality, there is nothing that fits you best other than being an entrepreneur. Do not wait and don’t think twice! We are born to die and live to change. Let’s shape the team, build the game and go for it!
Vote for us! I promise we will help you on this journey on the same road.
Vote for XENA VISION as Ankara’s startup of the year!