During this year's Startup Week Düsseldorf, ERGO presented the new scale-up programme “ERGO ScaleHub”. Together with the two partners Wirtschaftsförderung Düsseldorf and TechHub.K67, the insurer wants to provide targeted support for scale-ups in the fields of healthcare, finance and insurance in Düsseldorf in future. The first scale-up to participate in the programme is CamCom from Bangalore, India. Geetha Sham, Managing Director of EU, IRE and UK regions, introduces us to her up-and-coming young company in an interview.

Hello Geetha, let’s start by briefly introducing yourself and your company, please: What is CamCom’s mission, and what role does AI play for your business model?

Thank you for this opportunity! CamCom is a beacon of innovation, offering award-winning, industry-agnostic Large Vision Model (LVM) platform. Our platform is a game-changer, revolutionizing defect/damage/distortion identification and assessment on all fundamental building blocks like metal, plastic, glass, rubber, and concrete surfaces. The key to our success lies in our pioneering use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and associated machine learning technologies in visually inspecting and analyzing images and videos. This ensures objectivity and consistency, addressing the often subjective and inconsistent nature of visual inspection done by human eyes.

We launched the world’s first LVM for defects, damages and distortion assessments, an advanced AI system designed to understand and contextually process visual data. CamCom LVM is based on deep learning architectures and trained on datasets of over 450 million customer-validated images to acquire the ability to understand and contextualize visual data, such as images and videos, and be adept at visual tasks like context understanding, image classification, object detection, and advanced image analytics.

Our LVM excels in transfer learning, a technique where a pre-trained model on a massive dataset can be fine-tuned for newer and specific tasks using relatively minor add-on datasets. This adaptability makes our inspection solutions sector-agnostic, with effortless expansion of use cases as quickly as possible. This also reassures our customers of the platform's versatility and sets us apart from the competition.

Our mission is to uphold quality, democratise computer vision, and provide affordable solutions to enterprises that unlock the value of visual data for insights. AI-powered visual inspections make up the bulk of our business model.

I represent CamCom as the Managing Director of the EU, IRE, and UK regions, which are some of our fast-expanding markets for CamCom. An engineer by qualification, I have seen the technology evolve and change the world since the 90ies. Change has been constant in our industry and has laid the foundation for innovation propelling growth.

At the launch of the “ERGO ScaleHub” in Düsseldorf, you said it was “a great honour and a real privilege to be able to work with ERGO and its partners in ERGO ScaleHub”. Why? What appeals to you about taking part? And what is CamCom’s contribution to the Hub?

For one, I find ERGO's values and sentiments perfectly in sync with our ideals. The people I have met from ERGO Group have been simply phenomenal, both in their business acumen and humility. Our quality process also extends to customer centricity, just like ERGO Group. I believe this relationship paves the way for a fabulous business association. ERGO’s philosophy - simple because it matters - resonates with CamCom. We want to deliver simple, innovative, and customer-focused solutions consistently.

The ERGO ScaleHub program is tailor-made for CamCom, a company aiming for fast growth at scale and wanting to offer its products or services to a EU and global market. ERGOʼs Innovation & Digital Transformation Unit, the Düsseldorf Office of Economic Development, and the community space TechHub.K67 will provide systemic support to CamCom in Düsseldorf, which will be of enormous importance.

The program helps us network for international markets through faster access to new technologies and innovations. It significantly reduces time to market, which is relevant as we develop more use cases in Insurance.

We are being given access to ERGO’s internal networks of mentors and experts, allowing them to exchange ideas and information on specialist insurance subjects, business models and financing matters. ERGO Accelerator program will help us establish contact with national and international venture capital and corporate venture capital investors. In addition, we will have access to the ERGO global business and start-up network. Moreover, as part of project-based proof of concept (POC) activities at ERGO, they can test our new solutions for customer satisfaction, profitability and functionality and share instant feedback for market readiness.

CamCom, as the pioneering participant in this program, offers unique AI-powered solutions for damage assessment on virtually any surface. Our solutions, already being used by some of the world's largest insurance companies, have proven highly effective. They enable users to settle claims in real-time and often in less than 5 minutes. Our long-standing successful collaboration with HDFC ERGO General Insurance in India (a ERGO group joint venture) for over five years further underscores the effectiveness of the solutions. This is just the beginning of what we are offering the ScaleHub. There are several other avenues, like heavy and lightweight vehicles, property, embedded insurance etc, where we can bring innovation.

Why did you pick Düsseldorf as a suitable additional location for CamCom?

Düsseldorf being an international business and financial centre is the best suited for business expansion in Europe. The city is centrally located and apt for easy travel across other Europe regions via rail, road and air.  The Heinrich Heine University, which has subjects in natural sciences, mathematics, and computer sciences, allows us to engage with the next generation of talent and collaborate with universities on innovative projects.

The city of Düsseldorf will provide the community support which is necessary when in a new region. The office space of TechHub, K67 Düsseldorf, is well equipped to kickstart our business immediately.

We are in the business of quality inspections, whether manufacturing quality, service quality, or quality of life. What better place than Germany and Düsseldorf to find our feet Europe?

And how do you currently rate the Düsseldorf metropolitan region as a hub for start-ups and scale-ups like CamCom - and what could hopefully change for the better in the coming years as a result of the “ERGO ScaleHub”?

I think it’s great to begin with. It will be an excellent place for companies looking for rapid and scalable growth. There will also be benefits from regular events and workshops that provide opportunities to introduce companies to a broader pool of investors and customers. I am optimistic about the Düsseldorf metropolitan region. ERGO ScaleHub will help to globalize Düsseldorf even further. The city of Dusseldorf is also extremely flexible from a governance point of view with the start-ups in their initial years of growth and scale.

Interview: Ingo Schenk

Read more

What motivates ERGO, the TechHub.K67 and the third partner, Wirtschaftsförderung Düsseldorf, to work together in the ‘ERGO ScaleHub’? And to what extent do the scale-ups benefit? We have already answered these questions in the case of ERGO, as well as for the TechHub.K67. The interview with the city will follow shortly, along with further articles and background reports on the new cooperation.