Mikus Opelts: Yes, even though still young, but we have had our fair amount of success. Giraffe360 CTO Einars Deksnis is first ever foreigner to win Japan’s robotic sumo championship. In the past, Einars was the CTO and held various senior engineer roles at multiple hardware companies our CFO Gints Sloka has extensive financial services and corporate finance experience.
Gints was previously Head of M&A at KPMG Corporate Finance in Latvia where he closed multiple deals with a total value of over two hundred million euro.
As a student I built one of the regions leading interactive technology service companies. I was the winner of the Swedish business award, German business award, and Forbes Latvia 30 Under 30.
GD: For the uninitiated, where does Giraffe 360 fit in the virtual reality?
MO: In virtual reality, Giraffe360 is aiming to streamline remote property viewings. Imagine zoom call for viewing all real estate.
GD: What’s behind the Giraffe 360 name?
MO: The giraffe is the biggest animal in the jungle. With the long neck it can see everything. Our technology symbolizes this incredible animal’s ability to see more.
GD: Why start with property sales? Aren’t there other use cases you’ve deployed?
MO: Crime-scene documentation, for example, can be another one. Real estate is the world’s biggest asset class and finding a home is an essential need for almost every human been on the planet. Yet we still do it in an incredibly archaic manner, running around busy cities, scheduling meetings, and wasting time.
GD: Why include the hardware in your “VR as a service” model?
MO: Our goal is not to sell cameras. Our goal is to enable effortless space viewing from any place. In order to do that, we need space accurate and in high quality and a perfect digital image. We could not find any camera in the world sufficient for our clients’ needs so we decided to build our own. But we kept our business model as a simple subscription and as long as you need it, you can use it. There’s no need for that added investment.
GD: Share the numbers. How many clients so far? Subscribers? Other metrics?
MO: We delivered our first camera in February 2016, so exactly two years ago. Now we service clients in eight countries all across Europe — the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Malta, Ireland and others.
