Portuguese company wants to produce electric cars

‘Enging’, of Oliveira do Hospital, has created a proprietary algorithm that monitors industrial equipment, has already entered the nuclear sector in Spain and hopes to enter the electric car sector in the future.

Created in 2011, this ‘startup’ made its first pilot in 2013 at EDP Distribuição and, since 2015, it has been “in force” for the market, working with major companies in the sectors of energy, water, pulp production of paper, petrochemical and cement, as well as in nuclear energy in Spain – a “potentially large market” – where they already work in the Trillo and Almaraz plants, and are also in the process of installing their service in Cofrentes, near Valencia, said Enging’s CEO, Marco Ferreira.

At the moment, the company has sales in Portugal, Spain and Brazil and are in the process of entering Italy and the United Kingdom, as well as having prospects of penetrating other markets such as Turkey, India, Germany or Austria in the future, reported.

Enging, which was selected to be present at this year’s edition of the Web Summit in Lisbon, has created an own algorithm that allows to make an early or anticipated diagnosis of possible equipment malfunctions in an industrial context, which translates to companies in a “reduction of maintenance costs with possible production breaks. ”

“Imagine that you have a device in your heart, which is monitoring your heart rate 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day. This device encounters an arrhythmia and sends an alarm to your cell phone or your family physician, who action of yours or your doctor.This is what we do in the machines, “says Marco Ferreira.

In this way, it explains, the company can plan a stop in the production when a possible breakdown or degradation is detected, through the diagnosis made by Enging, accompanied by recommendations for the maintenance of the equipment.

According to Marco Ferreira, the entry into the market has “run very well”, emphasizing that “there is no key sector”, despite registering higher billing from the electric ones.

“In the future, we want to be in the automotive sector, especially electric vehicles, where our solution can be an added value for motor monitoring with a user interface of the vehicle that engine is in good condition or has some degree of degradation, “he said.

According to the executive director of Enging, the company currently has 13 employees, and the prospect is to extend the team by entering new markets.

“We are at a stage where we are no longer a ‘startup’ and we become an SME,” he said, noting that billing has also been growing at a rapid pace, with € 600 thousand in 2017 (twice as much as in 2016) and the prospect is to exceed one million euros in 2019.

Enging was founded in December 2011, at the time in Coimbra, by four engineers from that city, coming from areas such as physical, mechanical and electrotechnical engineering.

Following a prize from Câmara de Oliveira do Hospital, they transferred the facilities to the BLC3 – Technology and Innovation Campus.

From the beginning, instead of looking for a business largely supported by external financing, they wanted to sustain their business in results, taking advantage of the capabilities of the founders, and offered other services that “were not about business focus.”

“With positive results from the beginning, there was money to invest in R & D,” says Marco Ferreira.

“Having a business leveraged in results is much more satisfying and rewarding than successive leverages and without business sustainability, so we know what step we have to take next.” Sustainability is more important than growing out of proportion “he said.

With the Web Summit Summit, Enging expects to develop new contacts and open new doors and also give greater visibility to the company, which is based in Oliveira do Hospital, a municipality very flogged by the fires of 2017.