Equipping robots with a seventh sense 

Sevensense Robotics SA was founded in 2018 as an ETH spin-off. The team of engineers developed software that makes robots more intelligent than ever so that a moving robot notices and perceives what happens around it and adapts its actions accordingly.

This autonomous self-driving capability is possible thanks to visual AI navigation and the technology bases on more than 15 years of robotics research at ETH Zurich. "In Professor Roland Siegwart's Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH, with Gregory Hitz and the other founding members, we were looking for applications for visual navigation technology. Eventually, we ended up applying it to cleaning robots and thus found one of our core markets," says Andreas Pfrunder, Co-Founder of Sevensense Robotics.

Strategic partnerships for pilot projects

Sevensense's technology has received international recognition: In 2021, it won the Robotics Innovation Challenge hosted by ABB. As a result, ABB and Sevensense entered a strategic partnership. With ABB on the board and in the cap table, Sevensense won a strategic investor with access to the global industrial network. According to Andreas, the partnership is very exciting: "We appreciate that ABB has a long-term strategy that allows the corporation to prioritize our mutual projects. In return, we help ABB to innovate faster and stay competitive in the market."

The first commercial robot with Sevensense's technology is a professional floor cleaning robot – manufactured by Wetrok in Kloten – which was launched at the end of 2022. The second commercial partnership was the one with ABB, which announced in April 2023 the integration of Sevensense's technology in their future vehicles. In addition, Sevensense is working on several pilot projects with Swiss and international key market players.

Customer loyalty is key for Sevensense. As sales and development cycles are long, we focus on creating partnerships based on customer-centricity and trust, mainly with large customers. 

From engineers to entrepreneurs

One of the biggest challenges has been changing from the engineering mindset seeking perfection to the entrepreneur's mindset looking to fill a market gap. "As engineers, we tended to build the presumably perfect solution without asking the market what it exactly needed. This is a common oversight for many technology spin-offs.", Andreas says with a wink. So, we had to invest resources to build a skilled marketing and sales department to complement the technical team.

Also, discussions with and inputs from the SEF.Growth experts about the Go-To-Market strategy will help the company to accelerate its business. After all, there are different ways to get Sevensense Robotics' software in a variety of autonomously moving robots and thus gain market shares. "The SEF.Growth program was precious due to the experts' neutral view of our business and their huge know-how when it comes to scaling up a startup like Sevensense", says Gregory.

Plans for the future go more toward software

In the future, Sevensense would like to move to a SaaS model where only the hardware is sold once. This recurring revenue has the potential for good gross margins while reducing initial investment in building robots. In addition, Sevensense can participate in the robots' success by delivering continuous improvements to their software brains during their entire lifetime.

Moreover, the Sevensense autonomy solution collects a lot of data that can be analyzed and, for instance, used for predictive maintenance. "We know when the robot will have a problem before it happens," explains Andreas. Hence, the data can be used for product-specific benefits and as add-ons for safety and efficiency-related topics. For instance, the visual sensors can detect bad driving behaviors of forklift drivers in logistic centers, opened security doors, or dangerous items lying around.

Finally, Sevensense will soon launch a new product, which will allow the tracking of manually operated vehicles, such as forklifts. This product will open an entirely new market with shorter sales cycles since it can be retrofitted