OSS Ventures — factory software studio

01The full story

Renan Devillieres trained as an industrial economist, worked at the OECD, then consulted at McKinsey, co-founded a company in Brazil and sold his shares in it to Google Ventures. That exit money became the seed of OSS Ventures, which he started around 2019 with one thesis: factories bought a lot of software 30 years ago — he points out IBM made serious money selling to manufacturers — and then stopped. The installed base aged into what he calls the innovator's dilemma, Tesla proved software could touch every part of making things, and nobody in between was serving mid-market plants. His read on why: "nobody tech goes to factories and nobody from the factory is good to tech." He sized the gap at about €90 billion in Europe alone and more than €400 billion worldwide for manufacturing software. The first customer came from brute force. He went to 20 factories, pitched them on building good software for factories, and got one yes against nineteen nos. In 2019 the company finished at a €1.6M run rate. By the February of the interview it was €2.2M annualised, across 180 deployed factory sites and a little over 80 client companies, split into eight distinct software lines each run as its own company with its own team. He had raised €6M on a €24M pre-money valuation after investing €800K of his own — money he says he negotiated out of his wife, who allowed him 25% of everything they had, "and so I went with more." The stated goal was to double every year, to about €3.2M by that December.

The cold start was literally walking in. Renan Devillieres went to 20 factories, told them he wanted to build good software for factories and asked to be let in, and came out with nineteen nos and one yes.