Meet Kasparium – Danish startup developing modularised warehouse automation for small to medium-sized companies
The team behind Kasparium are excited about developing their warehouse automation solution together with mentors and coaches at Odense Robotics StartUp Fund and the incubator at Danish Technological Institute. In this video and article, CEO and Founder Morten Bitsch explains why he started the company and the plans ahead.
Why is your technology and solution valuable and what challenge does it solve?
Warehouse automation has primarily been for big players. This means that existing solutions are not efficient and flexible enough for smaller companies and warehouses to really benefit. Our product attempts to fill that gap in the market to make a more efficient warehouse automation product that is easier to scale up and down and easier to move from location to location. Our solution provides an easy and almost plug-and-play access to warehouse automation.
Our solution offers flexibility because it’s made out of modules, approximately the size of a Euro pallet. And depending on your warehouse needs, you just collect as many modules as you need and position the racks on top of those. When you need more space, you just plug and play additional modules to the existing layout. Or if you need to decrease, you just detach it. So that gives the flexibility to easily let the system grow together with your business.
And if you outgrow the physical location of your business, many existing solutions are either not possible or really expensive to move to a different location, so they are often not moved. They are often sold together with the whole building. But our solution is made in a modular way so that you can detach each module, put it into a truck and move it to a different location. And you can put them together again in a different layout, add or deduct. Then you can click reset, and the system will understand that it’s now in a new configuration.
Our customers will not just benefit from a high degree of flexibility, but also very high picking speed, and savings in salaries and square meters needed for their warehouse.
Can you tell us how your company started?
It’s a funny story because the company started with my co-founder Tommy owning his own third-party logistics warehouse, building that up to a certain size and investing in some of the bigger warehouse automation systems out there.
Looking back, it was clear that a modular warehouse automation system would have been better for a small company still growing and moving locations.
So the concept came based on his experiences with warehousing combined with my background within software development.
What are your greatest opportunities?
It’s seeing if we can fill that gap in the market, offering warehouse automation to small or medium-sized companies. If we succeed, then our greatest opportunity is to build the business.
What is your startup’s greatest challenge?
As any startup would probably say, it’s a constant chase for liquidity. That’s the main focus for us right now: to keep the wheels going and find investors for the next stage of our development from prototype to a sellable product. We’re also strongly focused on the entire process around building the first prototype to seriously prove that we have a product that’s viable.
Why did you apply to the StartUp Fund?
We applied to Odense Robotics StartUp Fund and the incubator at the Danish Technological Institute because we saw that it could provide us with a lot of opportunities.
We saw that there are many skilled people here that could help us in terms of product development and sparring on our business model and pricing strategy. We could get help in areas where we are weak at this early stage, such as learning about hardware and software, and getting to learn existing solutions and clients within the area.
Another big attracting factor was that it provides us with much greater visibility towards the world. A lot of people interested in new tech visit Odense Robotics and Danish Technological Institute. Being located here gives us really good visibility and credibility.
What do you hope to achieve during your stay at the incubator?
While at the incubator, we hope to get sparring on software development, hardware development, and the business model as a whole. We have access to resources at both Danish Technological Institute and Odense Robotics that can help us with this.
We also hope to achieve greater visibility. Get our name out there. Maybe even get introduced to companies and we hope to get more potential investors and work towards potential clients.
Who is part of the team today?
I’m the founder and a CEO. Then I have my co-founder, Tommy, and we have a mechanical engineer, Mathias, on the team and a student working on our rack system. We have some other resources as well, which is within the software development and more specifically the algorithm controlling the movements of the racks inside our system.