ThruWave: Pieter Krynauw

IndustrialSage

Pieter Krynauw shares his career history and how ThruWave is applying millimeter wave tech to save retailers millions in fraudulent returns.

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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I’m Danny Gonzales, and today my guest is a company called ThruWave. I have Pieter Krynauw who is the CEO. We met at MODEX in 2022, and so I’m super excited to have you join me today, Pieter.

Pieter:

– Hey, thank you. Nice to be with you guys.

Danny:

– Well this is exciting. You guys have some really interesting technology. There’s been several awards that you guys have won over the last several years. For those who aren’t familiar with who you guys are, who ThruWave is, give me a little bit of a high-level of who you are and what you do.

Pieter:

– Yeah, sure. At a high level, we’re a small start-up based in Seattle. We’ve just developed some amazing, ground-breaking millimeter wave ocular vision technology that can sense through cardboard, plastic, at very high speeds making it a great solution to inspect packages that move along a conveyor. We construct a 3D digital image of what’s inside a cardboard box or a plastic tote providing the ability to verify quantity, condition, content for our supply chain customers. We use simple hardware technology like this, and then it’s all software to analyze and support our customers.

Danny:

– Excellent. That’s pretty cool. I remember we demoed it; I think we did some video content there. It seemed like it was very interesting technology. We’ll get into that here in a little bit more in the episode, but right now we’re going to pivot, go to one of my favorite sections just to learn a little bit more about you, Pieter. I want to learn about your background, how you got to where you are, hear your story a little bit. Take me back; how did you get into this space? Was it something that, did you go to school for engineering? What was that?

Pieter:

– Yeah, it’s a long journey and a longer story. I grew up in South Africa. After college I moved to the UK, probably had a plane ticket and £100 in my pocket. Might’ve been a little bit more, but it didn’t feel like a lot at the time. I had some software and computer networking training at the time. This being the late 90s, I was able to find a really nice job at a small data company in the UK, and I had the opportunity to work with just some fantastic customers, a wide variety of customers in the UK which was really fantastic for me as a young person, young professional. I returned to South Africa after about two years in the UK, did an MBA, and I was fortunate enough to get an opportunity with Honeywell. We had a large contract with South Africa’s largest petrochemical company, so I jumped straight into the fire. I worked myself up, sideways, up again, into various positions in South Africa, the Middle East, China, and into the US working in a variety of roles, mostly in process automation, industrial process automation. Honeywell then acquired a material handling company a few years after I got to the US. I went over shortly after to lead that business. That’s the short story of how I got into the supply chain space.

Danny:

– Excellent. Through that journey—obviously we got the short, we got the abridged version. Totally get it. I’m sure there’s a lot of things that probably, a lot of left turns and right turns and then circles and go back up. Typically, like with anyone’s career, there’s a lot of people that have had a major impact and helped to shape who you are today. I know there’s way too many to go over, but who is one person that comes to mind that really helped to create and helped you to be the Pieter of today? That could be a lesson or a scenario. What is that for you? Who is that person? A person.

Pieter:

– That’s also a difficult question. I think maybe living and working in so many different locations, parts of the world, every location leaves something with you. The experiences and the exposure you later realize is a blessing that very few people get to have. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with just some fantastic professionals, individuals, over many, many years. If I really want to think back to what made me who I am, I would have to go back to my dad in two ways, one probably good and one probably bad. The good part is that he just showed me the work, the integrity, ethics, hard work, and I got that from him. But I grew up in a small town, never really moved, and I think that also wanted me to be a little bit more adventurous and go do a few things that maybe I didn’t think at the time was possible or that I had the capability to do. That part I think also shaped me. Then I’ve also got to say, from moving a family so many times, my wife has just been tremendous. I think I was enabled by her sacrifice to put her career on hold so many times. Very difficult to pinpoint the exact influences, so those would be two. Then I also would like to think that I’ve taken some of the good things from everybody that I’ve worked with in the past, and then maybe also avoided some of the bad things that I’ve seen in people that I maybe didn’t like that much. A combination of things, but my dad and my wife would be two ones that have really influenced my career.

Danny:

– Certainly. That’s great. Let’s jump a little bit now to your transition. You said you spent a lot of time with Honeywell, and there was a lot there. You moved to a lot of different countries, had a lot of different exposure across the industry. Let’s talk about ThruWave and how that started, how you got involved, and what did that journey look like?

Pieter:

– That’s a really good question. Obviously I was very blessed to work with a really great American multinational company that afforded me a lot of opportunities. I really liked moving from oil and gas, petrochemical into supply chain, really loved that transition, and I just see so many opportunities for technological advancement, automation, improvement, things that maybe oil and gas learned many, many years ago that can transition into the supply chain space. I really just love working in material handling and supply chain. After a couple of years running Intelligrated, I came across ThruWave, and I was blown away by the technology and just what this team of scientists were able to develop. I’ve never really worked in a start-up environment, and I thought the combination of those two things—doing something I haven’t done before, getting into some awesome technology—was just a great opportunity for me to do something that I haven’t done before.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. It’s a night and day difference, going into very established corporate to start-up. It’s very entrepreneurial. Did you have that in your background at all? Was that something that was—is that spirit embodied in your family, or is that a new venture for you?

Pieter:

– I’m not sure; I guess working within a large multinational I think afforded me a lot of support, but I think to some extent also the places that I worked were so far removed from headquarters that you’ve got to do what you need to do to be successful. Roles aren’t always as defined and as clear, so working in the middle of nowhere you’ve got to do the project management, the sales, the service, the support. You’ve got to have a little bit of a self-starting nature and some entrepreneurial capability, I think, to be really successful. I think I learned that even though I worked in a fairly large company.

Danny:

– Excellent, very cool. Alright, so talk to me a little bit about that moment when you decided that, hey, I’m going to make this transition, and I’m going to jump onto the start-up. I imagine typically that’s a very challenging and difficult decision to make. Obviously there’s a lot of unknowns. It’s exhilarating, but it can also, I imagine, be a little terrifying, both sides of the spectrum. What was that like for you?

Pieter:

– Maybe I look at it a little bit differently. I think through my past career moves, I’ve always brought excitement and energy from trying things that I wanted to develop in myself firstly or tried to take on challenges that I haven’t done before. One of my first big moves was moving from South Africa to the Middle East. New culture, new location, new teams, different macro-environment. That was really exciting, although for me that was a sideways move at the time. Stepping out and growing into a company like ThruWave, I think the excitement and the challenge and the opportunity overshadows the risk or the doubt. I think from my point of view, that’s how I’ve always looked at things. I think if you’re going to look at everything that’s going to go wrong or if you’re worried the challenge is going to be too big, then probably it’s not a good move. Probably you’re not going to be successful. I tend to get energized by that, so I don’t think much about what can go wrong.

Danny:

– That’s great. I love it. The always positive optimist, it embodies a true visionary. Great, so ThruWave, you had this opportunity. How did ThruWave come to be in existence? Where did that technology come from? What’s the origin story?

Pieter:

– The founders of our company all came out of University of Washington where they’ve worked under Matt Reynolds and developed the basics of the technology. Then it spun off from there to really focus on the commercial application in the supply chain space. So out of UW, and it’s been a fairly long journey to really develop a technology solution that’s viable for supply chain customers.

Danny:

– The technology that you have, what exactly does it do?

Pieter:

– We use millimeter waves; it’s in the invisible spectrum. It’s totally human-safe. Think about it as a camera. Again, I’ll show the little module here. We have RF antennas mounted within this module. As an object, a case, a tote passes past the sensing module—we’ll have an array of modules—the movement and the waves reflecting off what’s coming past us gets received at the bottom. Then we would use those millimeter waves and reconstruct a 3D digital image of those reflected waves that comes back. Really simplified, but that’s in short how it works. Then once we have this reconstructed digital image, we can apply an analytic software algorithm, a classifier, and actually interpret the image and then do something with it. Think about it as, we’re taking a—this is a camera; we’re taking an image and then apply some computer vision algorithms to those images.

Danny:

– Absolutely. When we met—we didn’t meet, but I met your partner there, Matt—he was basically explaining to me, dumbing it down for me, was that essentially—that’s the same, if I understand correctly, it’s the same technology in body scanners at the airport that we might be familiar with. What it sounds like is there’s a lot of use case and applications to be able to—when we think of computer vision right now, it’s more on the surface level, on the exterior. But you have the ability to be able to actually give insights into what’s going on inside that tote or that package or the parcel. From a quality standpoint, or quantity, making sure that what is actually in there is what’s supposed to be in there. I’m assuming that’s one of the many applications. What are some of the top applications for this?

Pieter:

– Just to confirm, you’re absolutely correct. The scanning technology that they use at the airport, it’s also millimeter waves. We’ve been able to put it in a form factor with the right reconstruction and software algorithms have made it so that it can actually be viable within supply chain, working at very high speeds. In the airport instance you’ve got to stand really still, and speed and performance is a real issue. The team just did a fantastic job to be able to do that. Then you’re also correct. Think about a camera taking a picture; it’s really good with what it can see, but occlusion is a problem. Visible light spectrum is a problem. It can’t see beyond certain things which makes our technology really good. We can see through cardboard, plastics, light plastics, air packs, and the like. Yeah, so we can then see what’s inside which makes it a really good application to count, to detect damage, detect leaks. Heavy plastics, liquids, and metals really reflect well, and we see those images really well and we can then do something with it. Think about high-value electronics, liquids, bottling applications, security applications, counting applications for various industries. We’re fortunate that we can place throughout the supply chain, whether it’s inbound on the manufacturing side, within the manufacturing operation, outbound from the manufacturing, inbound to retail distribution fulfillment, outbound to whether it’s retail again or the end consumer, and then everything back through the reverse logistics chain, making sure the right things show up at your door. There’s no fraud; things are in the right condition, and the right counts are there. There’s a whole host of applications that will just grow and grow in the future as we develop new capabilities on the software side.

Danny:

– I can only imagine. As you were talking about all those different areas, lots and lots of applications. Is there a particular focus that you have right now as far as, from a go-to-market, that you’re really honing in on?

Pieter:

– We want to keep it simple, so we focus on a couple of use cases, a couple of applications. Really focused on a homogenous product set at the moment. Think about bottling, canning, operations whether it’s consumer product goods or in the bottling, beverage, brewery type of application. We can count bottles; we can detect broken bottles, broken cans, things that’s metallic of nature that’s missing, that should be there or metallic objects that’s in the packaging that shouldn’t be there. That’s got a nice, broad application, but from a software and a commercialization point of view, the value proposition is largely the same. And then the other thing we’re focused on is really determining whether the right quantity of things are in a box or a tote, so whether that’s in an ASRS system or in a packaging operation or picking operation. Those are the main things we’re focused on at the moment.

Danny:

– Excellent, well it makes a lot of sense, certainly. We’re talking about, I think you were mentioning a little bit about reverse logistics. That seems to be a big story right now, especially as a lot of retailers—there’s an influx of inventory because demand forecasting, the last several years have been crazy. Who the heck knows what’s coming down the track? Now everyone’s sitting on a ton of inventory, depending on where they are, right?

Pieter:

– On the reverse side, a lot of businesses have done a really nice job on the outbound side, but this growth in ecomm and then the reverse side, it’s just so difficult to keep up with. If we can deploy our technology and at least just tell our customers, “Hey, what’s supposed to be in there is in there,” it goes a long way for them to feel a little bit more confident that they can process a refund, process somebody trying to defraud them. Fraudulent returns in the US is about $25 billion a year, so it’s a sizable problem.

Danny:

– Absolutely, and it’s just like on the outbound side. It’s all about speed, speed and quality, so getting products and things to consumers—or could be other businesses—but then the same thing on the back end that you mentioned from a refund standpoint, get that going quickly. So I don’t think I’ve asked this—how long has ThruWave, have you guys existed?

Pieter:

– We’ve really come out of the shadows in the last 18 months to two years. Prior to that was really under the radar, in stealth mode, developing the core of the technology. We’ve gone through, over the last 18 months or so, we’ve gone through a lot of our POC testing, pilot programs, and commercial roll-up now. We’re really scaling up fast at the moment.

Danny:

– Excellent. You answered one of my next questions. Another question that I have on this just is from a funding standpoint. Have you gone through Series A? Where are you in that process?

Pieter:

– Yeah, it’s a good, timely question. We’ll be raising a Series A in the next, in the coming months.

Danny:

– Excellent.

Pieter:

– Before year-end.

Danny:

– Very good, very cool. Well listen, this has been—I’ve enjoyed this conversation. Like said when we met at—well we didn’t meet, but we saw ThruWave, I thought it was fascinating technology. I thought it was also really interesting that that hasn’t really, to my knowledge, from a visioning standpoint, there’s not a whole lot of other technologies out there like that at the moment. It just makes a lot of sense as far as all the different applications, specifically when we were talking about a lot of ecomm and logistics there and the supply chain space. I’ll give you the last word if you’d like to leave anything with our audience before we wrap.

Pieter:

– Great. We’re really excited about the technology and the solution that we can provide our customers. We think we’ve got a really disruptive vision of the future, and a lot of our customers, the only thing they can do today is throw labor at the problem, whether that’s statistical sampling and opening boxes and looking for defects or checking that things are good. We’re getting really a long way to automate that, make the labor a lot more efficiently and provide visibility to things that have not been visible before. We’re excited to work with the customers out there and really excited to get our technology and our solution out there to drive real value in what is a very challenging environment within supply chains. Restructuring of supply chains are going to happen, and transparency and visibility of data is probably going to be one of the most important things for customers to build a real competitive advantage within the supply chain. We’re excited to be part of that.

Danny:

– Excellent. You have exciting technology. We’re going to be hearing about you guys a lot more over the next several years, for sure. Pieter, thank you so much for spending some time with me today on the Executive Series.

Pieter:

– Thank you.

Danny:

– Alright, well that wraps up today’s episode with ThruWave. I had Pieter Krynauw, the CEO of ThruWave, which you can go check them out at thruwave.com. And that’s T-H-R-U-Wave. There’s a link, and we’ll have information that you can go check that out. Thanks so much for watching or listening. Maybe you’re listening on the podcast. Hey, if you’re not subscribed, I want to encourage you to go and go to IndustrialSage.com, and you can subscribe so you can get some of these great insights and hear about all the innovations and the technology that’s happening in the manufacturing and the industrial supply chain space because it’s rapidly evolving, and there’s some amazing things that are happening. That’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much for watching. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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