“You only learn what your passion is by trying to do something. Dive in and pick something – do the best you can out of it”
–Andrew Scheuerman, the CEO and founder of Arch Systems

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This is the fourth piece of our company blog series, in which we introduce our partner startups from the Bay area. We will dive deep into the company culture, founder stories, recruitment, and the employees in order to provide an even better picture of the experience Startuplifers is all about.

In the first blog, we introduced how BetterDoctor aims to reform the health care data provider accuracy in the US. The second blog was about Chartmetric, a company building a platform for music analytics. UnifyID was the company that we presented in the third blog. They are building an authentication tool that can identify people without actually bothering them to type passwords or swipe fingerprints. For this the fourth and final part, we interviewed Andrew Scheuerman, the founder and CEO of Arch Systems.

 

Attach sensors, collect the data, optimize the efficiency

 

Arch Systems was founded in 2015 by Stanford Engineering PhDs and emerged from non-profit work in Africa. It’s a venture-backed company working to retrofit industrial machines with IoT to drive efficiency. They have their background in supporting developing world projects, and today they work in electronics, textile manufacturing, and supply chain. Arch Systems aims to build a more efficient, connected and sustainable Earth.

How did the founders end up building such a company? “In 2011 my co-founder Tim Burke was in Tanzania trying to help rural village dwellers get access to clean drinking water. He noticed that most of the wells in Tanzania were not working a big portion of the time. He endeavored to build a monitoring system by attaching simple sensors to wells to detect if they were working or not. That would enable making a map for non-profits so they could maintain the wells which weren’t working. The idea behind Arch was to take a similar concept, of retrofitting legacy machines and creating intelligence with data, bring it to the Industry 4.0 revolution and drive impact in both the for-profit and back to the for impact world simultaneously”, CEO Andrew Scheuerman explains.

 

Arch Systems CEO and co-founder Andrew Scheuerman

 

Helping developing countries to keep up with the development

 

“The problem in Africa is not unique. Many people recognize the problem and try to build connected infrastructure, but they lack the resources. We wanted to do something about it. We raised some capital funding and hired a team of 5”, Andrew recaps the first steps of the company.

Arch Systems still hasn’t forgotten its’ developing country and the NGO heritage. Andrew believes that global manufacturers eventually digitalize their operations, but the change takes time. There is a risk that developing countries fall behind. “What we are doing is really important and nobody is doing the same thing. If we won’t do that, nobody does”, he sums up.

 

Building a team: hire people to support your strengths and define your core values

 

Like so many other startup founders, the Arch Systems CEO Andrew Scheuerman highlights how the team is a crucial building block for a company. But how to build a great team? “You can’t outsource the core functions. So when building the team, focus on what you are already good at and hire people to support with other relevant core tasks”, Andrew says.

“Another important thing is defining your core values at an early stage. We did that and it has truly helped us keeping the right direction”, Andrew shares, “our core values are a conviction to empower the data-driven world, wisdom with courage, and trust and integrity.”

 

Don’t be afraid of making an impact.

 

Arch Systems has a bold vision for the future. “We believe that in ten years, any machine could be done smart and that’s why we want to power smarter and more sustainable manufacturing all around the world. There’s a great demand for our product especially in the developing world”, Andrew smiles.

The Arch Systems mission surely is inspirational. But how can an individual find their way of making an impact? “Studying helps you to become a generalist with a wide knowledge base, but if you want to dive deeper into a specific sector that has to be done by working or studying at your own time. If I had a chance of giving my 10 years younger self one advice, I’d tell not to be afraid of focusing on making an impact in one specific area”, Andrew says.

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Arch Systems is a Startuplifers partner company, which means we’ve sent an intern to work with them. If you’d like to join Arch Systems as well apply to our talent pool and we’ll help you!

This was the third post of the Startuplifers partner company series. Read the first part here and the second part here and the third part here. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly updates on what is cooking!