I founded PI-VR GmbH in 2007 with two partners (Matthias Stiller and Andreas Zieringer). We had developed a technology that can be used to enormously accelerate product development through virtual prototyping. Our software solution is called VRED, which stands for “Virtual Reality Editor”. Virtual prototyping means that a wide range of analyzes during product development are already possible on the computer and many effects can be determined without having to make physical prototypes. This makes product development significantly cheaper and more agile.
My team and I developed this technology from 2007 to 2012. Over the years we managed to slowly gain a foothold in the automotive industry and convinced some customers that they could save huge amounts of development time and millions in costs with our technology. As a company founded in Berlin with a focus on automotive, it was extremely difficult for us to convince the German automotive industry in particular to include our technological solution in their control process. Although the benefits of our technology have been repeatedly proven and confirmed by a number of benchmarks that took place at regular intervals and although it was clearly superior to any alternative, it was ultimately impossible for us to scale our business. Why? The risk of awarding such an important order to a small company of 20 people is too great for the German automotive industry, it said.