Interview With Automatic Cargo Inspection Co-Founders

Building an innovative company that provides unprecedented solutions is a straightforward path to success, especially when you have an excellent co-founder team. Suppose you are visiting our LinkedIn page for the first time and would like to learn more about the backgrounds of Tomas Urbonavicius (further in the article T.U.) and Anton Vaganov (further in the article A.V.). In that case, you can read more about them here and here. A year has passed since the beginning of the ACI journey; we owe you all an update. Below, you will find a short interview with our co-founders.

Your company registration date is 22.02.2023, which means Automatic Cargo Inspection recently celebrated its birthday. Congratulations! By the way, it's a beautiful date. How do you feel after a year?

?T.U.: Well, we feel pretty all right. It's been an exciting journey, and we have reached some significant milestones. It all started way before the company registration date, but this day will be kept as our birthday.

A.V.: Frankly speaking, our active startup life started a half-year ago, in autumn 2023. At that point, we committed to full-time engagement with ACI. Before that, we had to suspend or totally quit our old projects and prepare ourselves for active development. Building a business from scratch differs a lot from managing an operational company. This experience could be compared with driving an ignited car versus towing a car with bare hands trying to ignite the engine.

You've mentioned milestones reached during this year. Could you elaborate on that? I am curious to know what goals founders set at the beginning of their company's journey.

A.V.: That's a good question. We often set our goals on the run and change them according to our progress. I will not boast that we have all our goals covered, but we can name what we could achieve a year after our company was registered. First, we mainly researched a market in Lithuania and delved into other countries' market specifics. That gave us a perspective on categorizing our reach to several potential clients.

T.U.: Speaking of technological milestones, we accomplished our core technology development and made a commercial version of our product, which is scalable now. We also started to train our A.I. models for new recognition. For example, we can read label texts, recognize handling signs, and count boxes on pallets. That is a good and timely addition to our A.I. model family that serves the logistics industry.

B2B sales are always complex, especially when a new company enters the market with the latest technology. That poses some risks for early adopters. What are the most remarkable challenges you've faced building a pipeline of your clients?

T.U.: Every new product faces challenges related to building a pipeline; the sales cycle for such products is longer, and we are no exception. Although, I would not say that each client is a new challenge for us. However, each client can challenge us by bringing their own specifics to the table and forcing us to resolve an issue that could be quite far from what we offered in the first place. You know, this A.I. magic sometimes makes people think that everything imaginable is possible. That's not true; each technical solution, even AI-backed, requires time and effort.

A.V.: My personal perception of the challenges of engaging clients with our technology and converting cold leads to clients is drifting to changing mindsets and building trust for technology within the logistics community. Here is a short example. It's a tough time for transit logistics in Lithuania; cargo flows have dropped drastically for the last 2 years. Therefore, we often hear objections from logistics companies: "It's a bad time for new investments." We totally agree with this expression. However, it's not entirely correct to call technology an "investment" only. The effects of technology implementation - I am not speaking about ACI specifically; it refers to all technology - are much more comprehensive than the ROI (Return of Investment) formula. We are happy to share insights with logistics companies' managers and owners, but sometimes, we wait for good timing to be heard. That is absolutely fine with us; we do not want to burn our prospects by pushing them to deals. Sooner or later, the numbers will tell the right path to building a more technological and resilient business.

Thanks for this example. How do you plan to cover new markets? Where do you want to go next?

T.U.: We are still in the research stage here; it's not a matter of intuition; market decision requires data, analytics, and live feedback. However, we were wise to start our research activities almost immediately after we decided to grow our technology as a startup. In May 2023, we visited Duisburg and presented our company at the FUTURE LOGISTICS event by Duisport Logistics Accelerator; in November 2023, we participated in the Transport Innovation Forum in Vilnius. We've also been a part of the IntraMag fair in Poland in February 2024, and we've already packed our luggage to visit a massive Logimat event in Stuttgart next week, the most prominent intralogistics event in Europe, if not globally. We collect much precious information and contacts from these events.

A.V.: Yes, that's true. Our technology was very warmly greeted everywhere we presented it, and each event gave us many valuable contacts that we converted to leads or potential collaboration cases. Today, we continue to discuss ACI technology implementation with companies from Lithuania, France, Poland, Estonia, and Germany. The further and wider these discussions go, the more understanding we gain for a given market.

It's great to hear that! Anton, as a business development founder, I have a question: Do you already understand which type of customer would be your "dream customer"? Regarding marketing, who is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?

A.V.: Certainly. It was not an evident conclusion, but as long as we do marketing exercises occasionally and constantly analyze potential customers' feedback, we clarified this ICP profile and are pretty sure about it. Our most desirable customer is a regional or global logistics company that provides transport and distribution services and has many depots across Europe. We will be able to serve this type of customer best as they have an active cargo flow - firstly, positively sensitive to technological shifts at scale - secondly, and promise us an impressive implementation at multiple warehouses across the reachable region.

Tomas, to wrap up this discussion, please give us a heads-up on what technology ACI will develop in the future.

T.U.: Well, we've got a list of ideas to check and validate. For instance, now we are working on the newest TOF (time-of-flight) type of 3D cameras to have the possibility for maximum accuracy, just as the client needs to be sure of every millimeter; of course, it's more expensive but worth it. We constantly scan the latest trends, keep in touch with manufacturers and 3PL companies to dig deeper, and have a broader vision of quality control problems in the logistics industry and intralogistics as a part of this industry. Ultimately, we are technology designers who think about the future but push off from existing customers' pain. Therefore, our technology ideas and development backlog are exceptionally customer-centric.

However, we do not rest with our core solution and make it work better and better from month to month. Training A.I. models is a process, not a one-time event. Today, ACI is technologically charged to reach out to any client and talk about his pains with cargo inspection or cargo data collection. Automatic Cargo Inspection is in good shape to respond to specific client needs without changes or severe adaptation to its core tech stack.

Thanks, Tomas and Anton, for the answers. If someone reading this article would like to learn more about our solution, they can visit ACI's website and leave their contacts there, and we will contact them.

I want to learn more about ACI.