WeGaw aims to be the #1 terrain technology provider for outdoors digital platforms and tourism offices
Business overview
| Location | Lausannne, Switzerland |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.wegaw.com/ |
| Sectors | SaaS/PaaS Digital B2B |
| Company number | WeGaw |
| Incorporation date | 26 May 2016 |
Investment summary
Idea
Introduction
WeGaw processes satellite and ground data to give Digital Outdoors platforms and Tourism Offices daily terrain status and risk alerts so that their users safely enjoy outdoors.
Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), WeGaw has created an outdoors terrain status and daily risk monitoring service that tackles what we estimate to be a €5B market opportunity. Using 6 different satellites from ESA and NASA, ground stations and machine learning, WeGaw provides a daily delivered outdoors monitoring service: DeFROST.
The early adopters of this solution are Tourism Offices and Digital Outdoors platforms. Currently WeGaw is serving 3 worldwide pilot users with another 4 willing to join.
After an intense research and development, DeFROST is ready to hit the market and we are seeking funds to grow and further develop the product.
WeGaw is part of the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse), top 10 International accelerator Masschallenge finalist and part of the top hospitality school EHL Business Incubator.
Intended impact
The main way today to gather terrain status information in large areas is to send a safety team to the field or cover the area with helicopters. At WeGaw, with our product DeFROST, we deliver daily terrain status information and risk updates to our customers through our satellite technology.
This can reduce operational costs for tourism offices and generates new recurrent revenue sources for outdoors digital platforms. WeGaw taps into what we see as a €5Billion market, serving 1 billion users going outdoors yearly. Our B2B2C model helps us reach easily to a mass scale by providing cutting edge satellite technology to our customers' users.
WeGaw seeks this complementary investment to the ESA grant to improve the operating value chain, in order to scale to any region of Earth.
By implementing the necessary functionalities, enlarging our sales and marketing force, WeGaw aims to become the 1# terrain status monitoring solution worldwide, to serve current pilot users and interested customers globally.
Substantial accomplishments to date
WeGaw's main product, DeFROST, has been entirely supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) under the ARTES20 program. During the program the ESA is mentoring WeGaw and financially supporting us through a € 220K Grant. WeGaw has succesfully finished the first phase of the program, Feasibility Study, and is applying to the second phase, Demonstration Project, in which € 370K would be secured.
WeGaw has been accepted in the main innovative programs in Switzerland, the core coaching program of Innosuisse, received 0% interest credit from FIT; receiving support from Innovaud, a grant from Canton Vaud; and accelerated in MassChallenge and the Fusion International accelerators. WeGaw generated € 66k revenue so far.
So far WeGaw has gathered € 360k in private investment, grants and credits to develop a proof of concept of DeFROST product. Currently serving 3 main pilot users in the industry (ViewRanger, Saas-Fee and FatMap), with another 4 organizations willing to join. This investment will help WeGaw in bringing the solution to the global market by implementing new functionalities and grow internationally.
Based in Satellite technology, the DeFROST operating value chain can be deployed in any region on earth, being globally scalable from day 1. At this stage, by 2020, WeGaw aims to become profitable and could search for a Series A financing round to be able to expand in South America (Peru, Chile, Argentina, etc.), North America or China with the upcoming winter Olympics 2022.
Monetisation strategy
Customers will be able to choose between an API serving map tiles (that would need to be integrated) and a stand alone solution.
API (Freemium services): € 0.01 per map tile served, first 500 tiles per month are for free.
Stand Alone Solution: Dashboard with a daily delivered terrain status map information:.
€ 1300/month for a 0-200 km2 area.
€ 2600/month for a 200-500 km2 area.
Special price for more than 500 km2.
On average a Digital Outdoors Platform serving 10,000 premium users would be charged about 51,000 EUR annually for WeGaw terrain status monitoring services.
Use of proceeds
Product 25%
Solution Architect, project manager, IP & legal consulting
European Space Agency 20%
DeFROST SubContractors: Exolabs, SLF. Operation cost DeFROST
Development 25%
Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, development expenses
Growth 10%
Marketing intern, branding, customer events, conferences
Sales 15%
Swiss/Alpine Sales lead, sales travel expenses, sales enablement cost
Operations 10%
Help Desk, operations support, management.
Market
Target market
Satellite powered terrain status insights can address the needs for terrain status data of any local and global outdoor activity businesses. We focus on tourism offices and digital outdoors platforms. Our beachhead customers are Digital Outdoor platforms that are community-based that provide itineraries and map information to their users. These platforms will be able to sell DeFROST data as part of premium services to their users. We aim to work with companies such as Fatmap, OutdoorActive, Wikiloc, camp2camp, Strava, Alltrails etc..
Local businesses are the local tourism offices (also known as DMO - Destination Marketing Organizations), promoting local tourism, developing activities, and informing visitors. DeFROST for DMOs is a centralized platform for terrain condition information sharing, including snow cover, avalanche, snow depth data but also any issue logged by the local teams. Information from the field will also feed DeFROST global database becoming a holistic source of information on terrain conditions.
Characteristics of target market
Yearly a total of 1 Billion people are engaged in outdoors activities worldwide. Roughly 690 Million of them get information online about the conditions and location of the activity:.
• Continental Europe (347 million potential users, 31% market share).
• North America (97 million potential users, 8.7% market share).
• South America (203 million potential users, 18% market share).
• Asia Pacific (439 million potential users, 38% market share).
• Africa and Middle East (15 million potential users, 1.3% market share)
• Australia (3 million potential users, 0.2% market share)
We understand that the average monthly subscription fees that Digital Outdoor Platforms charge its premium users is set at around 2.44€ monthly or 30€ yearly. Some examples are:.
• FATMAP 40€ / yearly.
• Komoot 30€ single payment.
• GAIA 34.8€ / yearly.
• Alltrails 30€ / yearly.
We estimate on average, such premium users check outdoor activities 6 times per month, consuming about 48 tiles per month. Based on charging an average of 0.5€ monthly per user to Outdoor Digital Platforms, our SOM would be 200€ Million.
Marketing strategy
WeGaw terrain status information will be consumed by Digital Outdoors Platforms' paying users and by local outdoors related businesses.
In order to acquire the current Digital Outdoors Platforms' user base, WeGaw has set up a B2B2C marketing strategy. By creating an easily integrable API for Digital Outdoors Platforms, we can reach a large mass of outdoors users while helping these platforms tap into new sources of recurrent revenue. The product can easily be integrated by small and medium Digital Outdoors Platforms to deliver DeFROST map tiles to their own user.
A stand alone solution will be made available to local outdoors businesses like Tourism Offices, to be used within a defined region within a daily monitored area.
WeGaw large customers are acquired through direct sales with a Sales and pre-sales process. The average sales cycle is 2 months and it takes an estimated € 26k in sales enablement to close, with a estimated €120k LTV.
Competition strategy
Main competitors in the terrain status and risk monitoring for outdoor activities are:.
- Manual Information fetching: The data is obtained directly by exploring the terrain by foot or helicopter.
- Destination Management Systems (DMS): Content and Mapping services for tourism offices. No terrain status data.
- WhiteRisk/Snopro/Ski Touring Guru: Solutions to visualize avalanche risk by ingesting avalanche bulletins in different regions.
- Earth Observation: Planet OS, THEIA and Modis Snow cover products. To our knowledge, none of them have a digitalized and tiled solution that can be easily integrated in third party solutions.
Our competitive advantages makes us the winning solution because:.
- We offer unprecedented resolution (30m every 24h), via an standard API.
- We have exclusive rights of commercial exploitation on key IP.
- By servicing tourism offices, we can gather terrain status data to feed back Digital Outdoor Platforms.
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