Heex Technologies

Heex Technologies is a French deeptech company based in Paris that sells a data management platform for engineering and operations teams working on AI and autonomous systems. Its stated premise is that most data captured by autonomous vehicles, robots and other connected devices is not useful, and that teams need better datasets rather than more data. The platform applies an event-driven approach: software agents deployed at the edge or in the cloud use user-defined triggers, built from Monitors (variables such as speed, weather or braking force), Conditions (thresholds) and Recorders (sensor streams, video, LIDAR), to extract small packages of relevant data, which Heex calls Smart-Data.

The offering combines cloud infrastructure, a web interface, edge AI with a Smart Anomaly Monitor, an SDK for building agents, APIs and a command-line interface. Triggers can be created, updated over the air and analyzed through event analytics. Data can be stored in the customer's chosen location (cloud or on-premises) while metadata is sent to Heex Cloud for processing and OTA agent management; the product is deployable as SaaS or on-premise, with role-based access control and data immutability. The technology is described as middleware- and hardware-agnostic, with examples for ROS1, ROS2, APEX and AVETO, and outputs Rosbags. Use cases span research and development (data collection at the edge, server-side data replay and re-simulation of historical data) and operations monitoring (production monitoring, anomaly detection and incident notifications).

Heex targets verticals including autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), industrial robots, smart mobility and off-road autonomy, with earlier work in autonomous driving, digital twins, predictive maintenance and computer vision, and adjacent expansion into smart cities, Industry 4.0 and space assets.

Founding story

Founded in Paris in spring 2019 after the founders returned from Silicon Valley, where the AI boom had begun to expose the limits of Big Data. CEO Bruno Mendes Da Silva, an ESSEC graduate and former professional basketball player who had earlier run an electric-vehicle rental and chauffeur business, learned from an engineer at an autonomous driving company in San Francisco that only a small fraction of test data was actually useful. He built the business case before the technology and recruited Arnaud de La Fortelle, then director of the Center for Robotics at Mines ParisTech - PSL, as co-founder and CTO; Etienne Boutan, with a finance background, completed the founding team.

Business model

Heex licenses software to businesses: edge and cloud agents plus a centralized web platform, SDK, APIs and CLI, offered to SMBs and enterprises and deployable as software-as-a-service or on-premise.

Sold as a software platform to enterprise and SMB customers under SaaS or on-premise deployment; specific pricing is not disclosed.

Traction

Heex reports working with major automotive equipment manufacturers in Germany and Asia, and with RATP and Nokia in France. In the United States it works with transportation authorities on a five-year experimental project in California to retrieve relevant data from companies testing autonomous vehicles in order to improve legislative frameworks and safety protocols. The company states customer cases in which 95-99% of processed data is eliminated, and that moving data to cold storage can require roughly 60% less energy than continuously accessible cloud storage. It reported around 22-25 employees and total funding of about EUR 10 million.

Latest developments

Following the EUR 6 million round announced in January 2024, the company said it would expand its technical team, structure its sales team and extend its product offering, moving beyond autonomous vehicles into adjacent sectors such as smart cities and Industry 4.0, and embedding environmental features in the product with impact investor SHIFT Invest on board. Its product materials describe an all-in-one operator platform with edge AI anomaly monitoring, no-code Resource Data Automation for ROS, and support for Ubuntu 20.04/22.04/24.04 on ARM and x86_64 with ROS2 middleware.