Geoffrey Vancassel, CEO at Sterblue, spoke to PES about this innovative company, which in 4 years has reached the serious player threshold. They provide easy to use software, complete with apps and a cloud platform, which enables off-the-shelf drones (DJI) to carry out complex inspections.
PES: Hi Geoffrey, welcome to PES Wind, it’s good to talk to you. Would you like to begin by giving us an overview of Sterblue and tell us something about your role in the company?
Geoffrey Vancassel: Thanks it’s a pleasure! Sure, at Sterblue we are three cofounders, with some background in aerospace engineering and computer science, Airbus alumni. Nicolas Draber is our COO, Vincent Lecrubier our CTO and I am the CEO.
Four years ago, we were truly disappointed to see that drones had literally no chance of performing some massive industrial operations: due to the low level of automation, with a real lack of digitization on the whole inspection workflow. That’s the main reason why we started up Sterblue.
Now, we build software which helps drones inspect power lines and wind turbines. Our software guides drones along trajectories that wrap tightly around structures, finds anomalies from the collected images, and outputs reports. The whole process is automated and triggered by the click of a button, using off-the-shelf drones.
PES: We know you are involved in many industries and would like to know how important the wind sector is for you?
GV: At Sterblue, we arrived a bit later to the wind market than our competitors and we were probably in an outsider position…until now. This allowed us to build on the latest technologies stack and get a powerful insight. The market does not need some complex, flying robotic solutions, but an easy to use and integrated solution.
Now, the wind market is key for us for two reasons. We strongly believe in our product strategy and if you go back three years from now, people had some doubt about drones, one year ago, people had some doubts about automation, now… well this is the only thing which is in talked about!
