Seven minutes with Teun van den Dries, founder of Geophy (formerly known as Officerank)
20th September 2015: This article has been updated slightly to reflect the change in name of the company. Officerank has now become Geophy to reflect their global ambitions. But the story so far and lessons learned remain the same. Now read on….
Portrait of an Active Scaleup
Teun van den Dries is CEO and co-founder of Geophy (until August 2015 known as Officerank). When we speak in late June 2015, they were one of the top finalists amongst 1600 startups in the recent Pioneer’s startup festival. On a closer look, they turn out to be very much more than a simple “big data mapping company” started by a team of Delft University students. They have uncovered a very important niche.
“We’re still young but growing fast. Our company was founded in November 2013 and we launched in June 2014. Now we’re at the point of scaling up globally within the next six months. Our presence at a major European startup competition triggered a lot of very important high-level investor discussions both in Vienna and immediately I got back home.”
So why the particular interest from investors in Officerank?
Making sense of it all
For the last two years, a team in Delft, the Netherlands been working on a challenge that many said was impossible.
“Banks, governments, and businesses all need to report extensively on the commercial assets they own and loan against” explains Teun. “There’s huge pressure on being transparent these days. And big fines, in the millions, if you’re not.”
“Yet, in practice, people rarely know what their own building is worth; let alone every commercial building in the country”.
Data is difficult to analyse
“For around 30 countries, the data is out there in some form. The problem is that it’s vast and mostly unstructured. There’s been no way of putting it together to get a clear overview.”
“Officerank is a new, unique service which creates that overview, verifying the source, allowing its users to assess risk and underlying value. You end up with a sort of due diligence report presented in a visual form that’s easy to understand.”
Insights come from real-time comparison
“We’ve built a database at the building level. It combines all the indicators of risk and market potential – with an overview of all the lease and purchasing transactions in that market. This may appear simple to the point of sounding boring. But under the hood, we’re doing a huge amount of number crunching.”
“It gets interesting when you realise just how big the numbers are. We’re tracking over 55 million buildings in the world right now on around 3000 data points. We’re using both public and private data sources.”
“It turns out making sense of this huge amount data is really difficult to do. In fact, when we started out two years ago, many industry specialists told us it was impossible.”
“Now, I love a challenge like that. Especially because, as an architect, I saw a way we could do it. “
“So, at the technical university in Delft, we formed a great team of brilliant engineers, economists and IT business visionaries to crack the problem. It took us a year of thinking, building, testing, and rebuilding. And my job was validating our hunches with highly critical, real-world customers.”
But our hunch paid off big time.
Cash Flow Positive from Launch
In June of 2014, we launched. We had the Dutch government, major banks, and consultants as launching customers. That means we’ve been cash-flow positive from day one.
We also realised that our platform is of major interest to insurance companies. Officerank can provide searches for possible fraud patterns or flood risks in all kinds of clever ways.
Always independent
We know our reputation is based on being fiercely independent. That’s why our basic data is open for public scrutiny.
We make our money from subscriptions to our unique set of analytical tools. I can’t name all our clients in public. But I can say that if you go to any bank in the Netherlands for a commercial loan, they will use Officerank to make a decision.
Our software works well, yet we’re always tweaking to make it better fit our customer needs.
And having validated the Dutch market, we’re starting to scale-up to other markets that are asking for analysis like this. We rolled out in the city of London in March.
Having proved that Officerank works, we’re working on a shortlist of 30 target countries, by the end of 2015. Next year we will start trialling in 5-6 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that don't yet have a land registry.
What we’ve built
“We started by mapping offices and then we add information layers to that. We're building a virtual representation of land ownership, including properties, as well as resources that lie beneath that land and details of energy flows like pipelines. That is currently defined on a country by country basis, e.g. the Land registry in the UK, or the Kadaster in the Netherlands.”
“We tap into their work, but then put it into a much more useful context, thanks to a much more sophisticated interface. Surprisingly, there are only 30 countries that have some form of land registry at all. The other 178 countries could definitely use one.”
“In developing countries, lack of access to a leger showing “who owns what and its value” is one of the key factors preventing them becoming a developed country. If citizens can own land, then a registry is the starting point for wealth creation, taxation and the country's development.”
“So we're building a mathematical model of the world, in its entirety. And the database is distributed rather like the “Bit-coin concept”, so no one government or country controls access to the data.”
“We're also developing a 3D scanning technology to take existing oblique aerial photography and satellite data to which we can add our information layers.”
“To do this we'll need to build a global organisation, because a 3D mapping operation like this is continuous. It's like painting some of these giant road bridges. By the time you're finished, you need to start again.”
Defining the business model
“One of the interesting side effects from an operation like this, is that it will be very hard for the bad guys to commit fraud because the property values and transaction history will be publicly available.”
“We want to become the independent, trusted intermediary. We know that our primary source of revenue will simply be to put this data in context as a subscription. We think that freemium models, where the user is effectively the product and access to their data has a value to others, is not going to work for us.”
Netherlands as a technology base
“It makes a lot of sense for this initiative to be headquartered in Europe. And the Netherlands, having diplomatic relations with so many countries, is the best place for the moment. It has excellent connectivity and technical infrastructure, so the core development team will remain here”.
Officerank hasn't released its revenue projections publically, but several analysts and major international investment funds have already shown keen interest.
What’s the next big challenge?
“Our biggest challenge for me as CEO is to find the right people to execute this vision to the next level. We're bringing more structure to the hiring process, so we can scale-up fast and efficiently. I know the team dynamics are going to change as we expand to 50 people by autumn. And we're investigating ways in which we can keep the flat organisational structure which has made Officerank such a great place to work. I'm currently looking at how other startups have successfully scaled up. And in 2016 we need to go global.”
What other advice would give other startups planning to scale up?
Let me share two golden tips that I’ve learned on the journey so far.
“If you're serious about building a real global company, then you need to think and act global from day one. That's a first requirement for serious investors. But it also makes a lot of sense. In our case, we spent too much time just testing the service in the Netherlands. Our breakthrough was to open a second office in London, where we quickly discovered challenges we didn't think of earlier. The UK still uses Imperial measurements in feet and inches. We had to do a lot of tech work behind the scenes to bring the UK and Netherlands together in one database. It amounted to reverse engineering the whole platform. But I'm glad we did. Because now we have a giant head start when compared to what's already out there.”
“It's always better to under promise and over perform. When you're playing at this level, assume that investors are doing due diligence on everything you say. Because they are. And they will.”