From left: Russell Vickers and Wassim Derguech. Image: FMCI
Co-founder Russell Vickers said the concept for FMCI came from the idea of providing a ‘stronger pull factor’ for the nascent automotive industry in Ireland.
Not very often do we feature not-for-profit enterprises as part of this series, but our latest Start-up of the Week is one of a kind. For starters, it belongs to the unique realm of companies that describe themselves as infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS, with a focus on the growing and lucrative mobility market.
Future Mobility Campus Ireland, also known as FMCI, was founded by semiconductor design engineer Russell Vickers and software engineer Wassim Derguech in 2020, just a month before the pandemic, with a mission to create an ecosystem for mobility companies to thrive in.
Based in Shannon, Co Clare, FMCI provides research and development infrastructure as well as services for the mobility sector. The start-up is home to a control centre that includes labs, workshops, control rooms and even an on-premises data centre. FMCI is also equipped with test vehicles, smart city infrastructure covering 12km of roads, a dedicated low-speed testing area and a drone R&D flight hub.
“Our mission is to enable companies that focus on the mobility sector to accelerate their product development,” says CEO Vickers, whom I met for the first time at SXSW in Austin, Texas last week.
“By providing the infrastructure, we provide a place for companies to test and develop their products in this market. Our customers can leverage our infrastructure to move forward quickly whilst reducing capital costs, essentially it becomes infrastructure-as-a-service.
“Our opportunity is to create a vibrant ecosystem here in Ireland which drives our success to expand and allow us to move forward. As we progress, we see the opportunity to spin out further companies based on our insights and knowledge in these markets.”
How it all started
A former engineer at companies such as Intel, Texas Instruments and Ericsson, Vickers has always had a passion for cars – which perhaps explains the desire to start a business focused on the future of mobility.
“I changed roles while in Intel to support their autonomous vehicle customers. This led to a small team of ex-Intel employees, including myself, to establish the software development centre for Jaguar Land Rover in Ireland. During my time at Jaguar, I got the opportunity to focus on new business models for vehicle services and that is where I got bitten by the start-up bug.”
While at JLR, Vickers hired Derguech, who had both a software development background and experience in funding proposals for large European projects. Originally from Tunisia, Derguech moved to Ireland in 2009 to study at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics based in the University of Galway. There, he completed a PhD focused on emerging technologies for managing business processes.
“This triggered his interest in the internet of things and data analytics [after which] he moved to multiple roles where he acquired more knowledge and skills in software development, project management and stakeholders and collaborations management,” Vickers said.
“The concept for FMCI came from the idea of providing a stronger pull factor for the nascent automotive industry in Ireland to support increased jobs and investment in this area.”
After spending some time carefully studying the funding ecosystem for this type of project, Vickers and Wassim eventually narrowed down on the Regional Enterprise Development Fund administered by Enterprise Ireland to fund FMCI.
“We formed the company initially as placeholder, not knowing if we would be successful or not with our funding application, or if we wanted to leave JLR. Thankfully we had a strong team of supporters who helped us put the whole thing together and we learned that we were successfully funded in January 2020, one month before Covid, which then brought a whole new level of complications that we hadn’t considered,” Vickers went on.
“The build phase took around two years, and we opened our doors last year.”
How it’s going
Today, the start-up that helps other mobility start-ups and companies thrive in Ireland is home to a “whole smorgasbord of technologies” related primarily to the capture and management of data.
For example, FMCI ground truth vehicles for data capture can capture anywhere from 25Gbps to 100Gbps depending on the sensor suite.
“This is a lot of data, which we then process and filter in our on-prem data centre. We have worked a lot with Cisco, RedHat, SecureLinx, Dell and Nvidia to ensure that we have a system that can be used in a secure manner to support many customers as once and for many different types of workloads,” Vickers explained.
“The reason we provide an on-prem solution versus cloud is that the initial data captures need to be post processed to derive the valuable data and discard the unwanted data. This makes more sense to do this locally.”
Another example is the company’s Smart City infrastructure, which was designed with the Cisco Galway team. Vickers described this as a configurable piece that allows any sensor manufacturer to “rapidly deploy and test” their solution in a real-world environment.
Finally, there’s the EALU-AER project, which Vickers said is Ireland’s first Digital Sky Demonstrator, which aims to develop a flight ecosystem for drones and related technologies, helping integrate uncrewed aircraft into Irish airspace.
Sky is the limit, literally
With such lofty goals in place and business taking flight, one might wonder how things are going at the FMCI team? Vickers said that the company has now onboarded several key customers who are utilising the testbed just as the founders had imagined.
“This is leading to a knock-on effect where we are beginning to be recognised as a unique provider of these services in Ireland and beyond. In terms of the team, we are now six people, and we expect to grow further in the next year or two as more projects come on stream,” he said.
“As most of our funding has been for capital investment, it is up to us to secure the revenue streams to make the business sustainable. We are doing that in a number of ways, including providing services to our customers and partners and also utilising the testbed for EU-funded pilot projects.”
Funding can be the most challenging thing for a not-for-profit start-up. But FMCI has been “well supported” by its partners and Enterprise Ireland up to this point.
“Our next phase of expansion is to support electric air mobility, AKA air taxis, and this will encompass a facility to support these operations including airspace management, hangarage and a substantial charging capability for electric aircraft.”
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