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EVITADO Avoids Collisions of Planes on the Ground — Using Lidar — Founder Interview

Updated: 4 days ago

This story was migrated from our old blog, originally published on March 9th, 2021.

What Is This About?

EVITADO uses Lidar technology to prevent collisions between aircraft on the ground — a critical safety problem at busy airports. Joe talks to founder Alexander Kasimir about how this Hamburg-based deep tech startup is bringing autonomous vehicle sensing technology to the aviation industry.

Executive Summary

  • This story was migrated from our old blog, originally published on March 9th, 2021.

  • This blog post first appeared first on old medium publication (https://medium.

  • This podcast is in media partnership with the Hamburg-based startup blog Hamburg Startups (https://www.

  • Joe talks to Alexander Kasinec (https://www.

  • Evitado (https://evitado.


EVITADO Avoids Collisions of Planes on the Ground — Using Lidar — Founder Interview Startuprad.io brings you independent coverage of the key developments shaping the startup and venture capital landscape across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

This story was migrated from our old blog, originally published on March 9th, 2021.



New Blog

This blog post first appeared first on old medium publication (https://medium.com/startuprad-io), and was moved to this blog with the relaunch of our website in summer 2024.


EVITADO avoids collisions of planes on the ground –Using Lidar

“The direct costs to repair a plane, after a ground collision usually runs least at 250.000 Euros. Not included are indirect costs like delays in schedule or revenues lost”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

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“We found that ground collisions of planes happen on average one or two times a month”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

Media Partnership

This podcast is in media partnership with the Hamburg-based startup blog Hamburg Startups (https://www.hamburg-startups.net/). They keep you up to date on the local startup scene in Hamburg, they organize regular events (in normal non corona times) AND they do have a special section on food startups as well. Even if you are not able to speak German, a visit with an auto-translate is worth it, since they also have an extensive directory of local startups on their website.

“I guess I am a bit an aviation geek myself”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

The Founder

Joe talks to Alexander Kasinec (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-kasinec-87715866/), co-founder of the Hamburg-based startup EVITADO (https://evitado.io/). Alex is an American, who co-founded the company in Hamburg. He started learning German in 8th grade already, spent time during his studies in Germany, and did an internship in Germany as well. He then ended up getting a master’s degree in Hamburg, where he met his co-founders.

“There are some pretty big [aviation] companies here in Hamburg. That is why we decided to stay here.”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

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“There was a list in 2017 by the FAA and one of the pain points were collisions on the ground by planes for example with hangars”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

The Startup

Evitado (https://evitado.io/) provides a warning system for planes pulled on the ground, so the drivers of these pushback tractors do not collide with other planes on the ground, hangar doors, and so on. Their system is based on Lidar and offers the drivers a Birdseye view of their plane and vehicle.

The idea of Evitado was developed by Alex and his co-founder, who met during their MBA. They made it to the finals in a pitch competition, which gave them a hint that their idea may be much more than just a hobby.

“Hamburg is the world’s third-largest hub for the aviation industry, behind Seattle and Toulouse in France”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

Venture Capital Funding

Evitado is looking for 750.000 € as a seed funding round. They would like to close the round end of June 2021. You can learn more here.

“Our system is based on Lidar technology”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

The Video Interview is set to go live on March 9th, 2021 17.00 CET (Frankfurt/Paris/Zurich/Milan)


“We would love to integrate our software in the Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is a beautiful tool”Alexander Kasinec, Co-Founder Evitado

The Audio Interview

The Audio Podcast will be published at the same time. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our podcasts here


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The Interviewer

This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:LinkedInTwitterEmail


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Transcript


[0:00] Music.


[0:08] That I owe you were podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startups.With News interviews and Live Events hello and welcome everybody this is Joe from startupradio daro your startup podcast and you to block from Germanyas well as the world’s first 24/7 internet radio station dedicated,tech companies and startups if you have not checked it out yet go to your favorite internet radio directoryand have a look and also in the future there will be a skill for your Alexa I do have in a media partnership with Hamburg startupsAlex you who is as you can already guess the founder of startup hey Alex how you doing hi Jim doing very well really thank you.


[1:01] Great to have you here as a guest and I would suggest we Jump Right In you are an American setting up a startup company.In Germany how did you end up in Germany and specifically in Hamburg.That’s a good question I would start with the fact that I started learning the German language in the 8th grade through my school.


[1:29] And I always got it I was always very interested in the German language because of the way it’s constructed all the rules and grammar I’m an engineer so this appeals to me very much so.And I was always interested in the culture and.In my bachelor studies I came to Essen for study abroad program in the summer of 2011.Doing Automotive Engineering internet internship and you know traveling all around Germany seeing the different Automotive sites.And sort of thought it’d be nice to come back and maybe do a master’s degree here someday and challenge myself on that.


[2:07] Eventually I did come back to get a masters degree in Germany and that’s how I ended up in Hamburg I found a program at the University Technical University of Hamburg.Which combined both engineering Masters of Science and Engineering as well as an MBA for technology management.And that’s how I ended up here in Hamburg doing that dual degree program and that’s coincidentally also how the start of came to be.


[2:33] I see and when I go a little bit through your CV you’ve been sticking more to the,technical side like mechanical development operation support engineer but but he also had a little had a little stint at PR and marketing how did thathappen and did it actually help you with building up the startup yes it’s every step of my journey so far has been helpful and interesting,I’ll just go back between my bachelor’s degree which I got in the United States in 2013and when I started my masters here in Germany in 2016 between that time I worked as a mechanical engineer in a large corporation,Automotive Corporation so I saw sort of how you know the big companies take a product to Market from the engineering side.And then when I came to get my MBA I sort of started to learn the language in the lingo of the corporate world.


[3:34] And you know as an engineer sometimes you underestimate the power of PR marketing and that’s something definitely I was guilty of when I first came.But working that PR job so it helped me see the you know the magic behind it and the importance of PR marketing to a business and that was a really good experience and really got me out of my usual skill setand I learned quite a bit during that timeDT deal with like General PR like a twisting interview setting up a venues getting contact to journalists or did you workwith like them or check the good part of marketing the lake optimizing websites Google AdWords advertisement like Performance Marketing stuff like that.


[4:22] There’s a lot more on the back end I would say working to optimize the message specifically due to my language skills in being a native English speaker I help revamp the website,on the English side to prove it but I also spent a lot of time making different marketing videos and producing that sort of stuff on the back end.And of course seeing the results of it on the front end but a being less sort of involved on the customer facing side.Well that that’s not that’s not too big of a disadvantage because I do believe especially in the technical marketing like Edwards search engine optimization and stuff like thisit always pays off to be a very deep into technical details at least in the first stage so you,get to understand what is actually going on there and how,did you make the jump to start a techcompany what was kind of like the trigger the trigger moment the trigger event I’m recently in the last few months all those trigger events appear to involve wine here at startupradio and did it for YouTube.


[5:38] Um not quite Maybe.So it would be a right yeah not so through my through my I met by for my one business partner through the MBA program he was also studying that that program and through.As a result of the thesis you a defined sort of a business idea that you could approach in a technical way because we’re all Engineers as well.


[6:04] And he brought he brought the the the pain point and the idea and I brought sort of high-level overview on the technical side.But the the Breakthrough came for us when I found a pitch competition that I thought we should enter.This is back in 2017 in Hamburg there used to be this competition called the uni pitch competition.And it was more about how well you could pitch rather than the business idea itself so you know we were interested in and pushing ourselves and really training our pitch skills,and we enter that competition and we got into the finals which was I think our big trigger point because that put us in front of two or three hundred people in a room back when you could do that sort of thing and,really gave us the exposure and people came up and started talking to us afterwards and that’s sort of what got the ball rolling that took it from something that was more of a student project or something that could be more serious,end.You’re in Hamburg so that usually is associated in Germany Mormon with like.Hi-C ocean shipping like like the big container freight shipping they also have the biggest Harbor for that inside of Germany but you ended up.


[7:28] Doing something in aviation was it that already as a kid you’ve been interested in Planes.


[7:37] Of course yeah.


[7:40] As I guess I’m a bit of a nav a nav geek myself and as an engineer it’s as one of the more fascinating Industries to just think about from you know physics and engineering and material side,so it’s something that’s that’s always been very interesting to me.And you know Hamburg has a great great Aviation Network as well I don’t know if that’s widely known that it’s the third biggest Aviation Hub behind Seattle and Toulouse France.So you know there’s some pretty big companies located here and that’s part of the reason we decided to stay around and hampered because the ecosystem was.So strong here at the aviation as well it just to be clear they do have aviation industry meaning lots of like.


[8:28] Planes,actually building they have big a bigger factory for Airbus there as well as all the nitty-gritty Parts details you would needaround that but in terms of like air traffic especially like passengers or Freight Hamburg is not.That big it’s it’s big but it’s like not in the top three globally.Just to make sure of that and basically you ended up there you always like planes and how did you come up with the.With the actual idea like a collision warning so this game from the pain Point itself my business partner Andrew.I was aware of this competition that the FAA would have each year in the states and they would bring various.Pin points to the table to say you know this is a problem that the industry is dealing with they basically put out a call to see you know how people can solve it.And this pain point of colliding aircraft with with hangers or with other aircraft while they’re being moved or towed on the ground was one of the pain points I believe back in 2017.


[9:39] And so he saw that and and.We sort of looked at it like that sort of the sort of a silly thing that you have these men are 300 million dollar aircraft sometimes that that you somehow just bumped into a buildingand you know the automotive industry is solve this problem already there’s a little parking systems that beep at you so why can’t you know why can’t the aviation industry has something similar,and that’s sort of how we came about the pain point.


[10:09] Let us put this little bit into perspective if I find some open source material I’ll throw some pictures but basically the issue is likethere’s not somebody sitting in the pilot seat and is hitting a wall with the plane but actually they’re verypowerful very flat vehicles that are actually pulling like like the bigcheck planes and if you’re sitting in such a small but very powerful vehicle you’re not always aware of the dimensions like the height or the wingspan,off the actual plane and I do believe that that that’s where the problem comes in rightexactly it’s very difficult from that perspective to keep track of all the surfaces as well as doing the job of moving the aircraft itself.And so they’re just stop sort of limited visibility.They usually have a team of workers that try to help them you know see around the entire aircraft.Anything that’s human Airbase of course has situations where you know people make mistakes.And you know this is sort of what our project is trying to address is the human error in this process and how could you bring a tool that at least brings some sort of.You know assistant to to the person moving the the aircraft in the tub.


[11:30] Before we get into system do you have some numbers like on average how much it costs to repairstart to damage for example when a wingtip hits a wall or like the.Oh how do you call this the back fin of the plane hits the wall right well door yes this is,the direct costs associated with doing repairs on aircraft usually run you at least 250,000 euros.But the that’s just the direct cost so you know if you can imagine that that plane was expected to fly the next day and they had to cancel the flight or they had to get another machine to do the job or.There’s a lot of Revenue loss potentially there’s a lot of indirect costs so you can imagine that that total gets very high very fast.


[12:21] And we found actually statistically this is something that happens one to two times a month and operations and.You know there’s many thousands of movements going on every day.Just one Airline could do for example 14000 movements in a year just on maintenance alone.So there’s lot of moves going on in the background that you don’t necessarily see it as a passenger a key and sell,now let’s imagine you are by the way I would love to do the sitting in this very powerful week eagle and you towing something like a A380 Airbushow would your system like from the perspective of a driver now help this driver not to clip,a wall or Corner something like this or another or even worst case another plane who’s standing there waiting red.So the system that were using is based on.


[13:19] Lidar technology and is so it’s constantly scanning the environment looking for what is out there,and if something enters the the basically the Collision risk Zone,then that information is communicated back to the driver sitting in the tug and this can be done a number of ways but one way we have currently set up is it sort of gives you a bird’s-eye view of the aircraft.And when an object enters a certain Zone then the warning shows up on this bird’s eye view showing you where it is,so that you can stop and look and see what the potential Collision is.Um and get a better understanding of your surroundings and a real time in real time your company is called evitado how far are you guys,with your current tool with the current solution.Yes actually just a quick note we were Chris formerly called flew kilo,and that’s what we had done a good deal of our pre founding work underneath that nameyou guys don’t do the easy man but it’s a as Esperanto for Wing flew killua’s Esperanto for Wing so we’re trying to find something along like Wing protectors or you know Wing Watchers.Um but we found that that name is not necessarily internationally compatible it’s good for Germans because fluke is German sort of word.


[14:43] Outside of driven Market people had a hard time with it so we changed it to evitado which is sort of the root for of avoidance so we have collision avoidance Technologies is the idea of the name.


[14:55] So currently we founded the company and July of 2019.We had done some work with the Airbus Biz lab accelerator really understanding the pain Point watching them move aircraft for about two weeks in their facilities before we even put something down on paper,of the first design.We spent some time on a high level overview you know using lidar in this environment because it hadn’t really been used 3D lidar hadn’t been used in this environment before so we were just,sort of proving that the data would give you enough information to see the surroundings properly we currently have a,you know a very high functioning prototype that we can bring to customers to do demonstrations that we will give over for a couple months at a time to do trials so they can understand how the tool would fit in their operations.


[15:47] We’re sort of in the product Market fit stage just really validating that and validating the the value addition to the the customer that we think our tool provides.And we’re also consequently raising a seed funding round to finish this product Market fit stage that we currently find ourselves in,I have multiple questions on that but first we said you’ve been with Airbus and watching several weeks how they actually move those.


[16:18] Big two extremely big planes I had like.Instantly the picture in my head he sitting in a camping chair one hand bag of chips the other hand it can offer some soda and watching planes was that the case.More or less yeah they took us around and use a great experience because we got to go with the end users of our tool eventual tool,and really understand from their point of view with their job was like what the requirements are both from a hard perspective of like what is the maximum weight of the product.To resolve perspective of you know how would actually make their lives better.Because in a you know the B2B business of course you’re saving your end-users money or time,that’s the given but you have to also offer them you know peace of mind or you have to make their lives better in some way,and that’s some of the soft skills we picked up doing that internship and we also were able to forge a really good relationship with the end users and sort of.


[17:14] You know get into their Persona and understand what their needs are as a really great experience.Oh yeah yeah I think so I would just go there just to sit there and moved and look the planes moving with the soda and a bag of chips but you’re talking about lidar and your product how far does it go is it like,only the lightest enters is it software behind it will be eventually like a like a monitor light like a flat screen inin the in the tow vehicle itselfyes so currently the system largely communicates to like a tablet and in the tablet is the user interface that says with the top driver and does that in real time.Mainly what we do although we have a hardware product or Hardware system that we that we end up putting together,we’re actually more of a software company so we’re doing this we’re working on the robotics software topics that are the same as what you find in the self-driving car industry,but we’re taking these and transferring them to these industrial applications to move these large assets so in a sense you know our first use case is moving a commercial aircraft.But the system can be used for really any asset that you want to move and it’s quite powerful if you think about,you don’t have to really wait for the Industrial Automation Revolution because it’s here now you can install our system on any asset you’d like to move whether it’s smart asset or not.So that’s sort of the the overall vision of our company.


[18:44] And more why we you see ourselves as a software provider than the hardware provider,okay before I get in like my last question there was one in between because when you talking about what you guys are actually doing that you providing it on,tablet the the final output I was thinking there are many companies out there who do some very sophisticatedflight simulators have you ever given consideration to do this actually as a simulator as as a like more or less realistic game as well.We would love to add our tool to the Microsoft flight simulator for example because that is a beautiful I don’t know if you’ve seen that maybe they have peaks in your community who might play Microsoft flight simulator the most recent one they’ve released.But it’s beautiful it’s so well done the graphics are so realistic and the operations are so real.


[19:39] Um so yeah we’ve been trying to reach out and get our tool on the

simulators like that and we do use on the back end in our own you know development process we use a lot of simulations as well so it’sdefinitely something we could we could get intoadmittedly I do have a relative who is a licensed pilot so he flies around tourists in the usual regular scheduled flight to like North Africa andEastern Europe and parts of the Middle East so he’s a full pilot and he also has all the gear you would need for the flight simulator at home so I know a few people who really are into this stuff and actually they’re professionals doing thatthe last question you were you’ve been talking about it a seed round how much are you looking at like in terms of raising total money and when will it be when are you looking to close it I assume.


[20:37] The current situation with Corona kind of extended your time Horizon when you when you’re looking to close this round,yes the covid situation has been quite interesting for us it’s given us a first by first-hand lesson on how to manage a little crisis,obviously the commercial Aerospace industry was pretty well impacted by this the pandemic,and that’s challenged you know the validation of the business model especially last year we have been seeing this year is that the market is picking up again and a lot of interest is come back to the table.It’s not the market argumentation is not so critical for us right now because you know we don’t need the whole Market to pick up we just need one or two initial you know paying customers to say yes and to trial product and to use it in our operations.


[21:24] So I think by the time it is we’re ready to scale and enter the market and force that the commercial Aviation Market will pick up for us in a good way.And I’m hoping the Baby Boomers all get vaccinated and restart the travel industry as I’m sure many people in the aviation industry are hoping.


[21:43] For me personally personally it’s I’m not a rock plug-in that I would love to travel againbasically since karuna my my Horizon has been limited to my apartment since I’m working from home getting around like grocery shopping and drive to my mother’s placethat’s about it no more and but but I totally see that.


[22:12] Make sense your business your tool and also,when you survived Corona it shows the validity of the team as well as the approach to external investors and everybody would like to learn more they can go down here in the show notes and reach out to youdirectly via the company website or your LinkedIn profile.Yeah that’s right that was one of the biggest lessons for the Sisters the team you know sticking together through crisis helping each other out and we you know we were really happy with the team we’ve built up and we’re looking forward to continuing this project.Um you know we’ve also taken the time to look into other Industries and to reach out to other pain points.But you know through the continued support of our partners in the Aerospace industry who sort of stuck with it and we think it’ll turn around pretty pretty soon here for us.That being said just answer your questions about the seed round.We are looking for 750 thousand Euro we think this will give us around 18 months of Runway time,finish this product Market fit and good guy gather as much interest on the market and also allow the market to recover a little bit to be ready to raise a larger round to do the scaling and entry to Market and force.


[23:27] And we’d like to close this round by you know basically the end of end of border to would be ideal for us.And we’re very happy to talk to any investors or anyone out there who is interested in learning more about our project we’re very approachable group just out of your gut feeling when do you.


[23:49] Guess or estimate that commercial Aviationwe’ll be back at pre karuna levels we shared just a few weeks back the interview with the executive of travel Tech startup and he said 2024,it will be back to pre Corona levels do you also have like such a drug outlook on the aviation industry or do you think like 2022 it will all be back to normal and we see new boom.Yeah that’s a tricky question you know 2019 was,pretty much the best one of the best years in aviation commercial aviation history so you know that’s that’s a tough that’s a high bar to reach when we reach that level again I’m not sure.Specifically for a per our project actually are traffic and the number of movements don’t correlate one to one sowe have a little bit of protection from from the market and that way I would say based on my estimate I think the market would recover you know.Decent amount bye-bye mid 2023.


[25:02] And I think as soon as soon as it’s able to recover people will be out there and Airlines will be pushing hard and I think things will bounce back relatively quickly once once Things become safe to do so.I think everyone sort of itching to travel or to go places or to do to do business and I think that the air traffic will recover really quickly.Thank you very much for being an interview guest herethank you very much for the inside and looking forward to have you back in sometime thank you very much for having me That’s all folks you’re fine thank you so much guys events and interviewswww dot start a friend that I oh remember.


[25:45] Music.




What Is EVITADO?

EVITADO is a Hamburg-based aviation startup that uses LiDAR technology to prevent aircraft collisions on the ground at airports. Founded by Alexander Kasinec, the company addresses a critical safety gap in airport ground operations where traditional systems fall short. The episode was produced in media partnership with Hamburg Startups blog.

Introduction

In this founder interview originally published March 9th, 2021, Startuprad.io speaks with Alexander Kasinec, founder of EVITADO. The Hamburg-based startup uses LiDAR technology to prevent aircraft collisions on the ground — a significant safety challenge at busy airports. The episode was produced in media partnership with the Hamburg Startups blog, reflecting Startuprad.io's network of regional startup media partners across Germany.

Executive Summary

EVITADO tackles a critical aviation safety challenge: preventing aircraft collisions during ground operations at airports. Using LiDAR technology, the Hamburg-based startup provides collision avoidance systems for planes on the tarmac. Founded by Alexander Kasinec, EVITADO operates in the specialized intersection of aviation safety and sensor technology. The company was covered through Startuprad.io's media partnership with Hamburg Startups.

Key Takeaways

  • EVITADO uses LiDAR technology to prevent aircraft collisions on the ground at airports, addressing a critical aviation safety gap.

  • Founded by Alexander Kasinec, the startup is based in Hamburg and operates in the specialized aviation tech sector.

  • Ground-level aircraft collision avoidance is an underserved market where traditional systems have limitations.

  • The episode was produced in media partnership with Hamburg Startups blog.

Atomic Answer

Entities Referenced in This Episode

  • Alexander Kasinec — Founder of EVITADO

  • EVITADO (evitado.com) — Hamburg-based aviation startup, LiDAR ground collision avoidance

  • Hamburg Startups — Regional startup blog, media partner

  • Topics: LiDAR, aviation safety, ground collision avoidance, airport technology, Hamburg startups

Quote Highlights

  • "EVITADO uses Lidar technology to prevent collisions between aircraft on the ground — a critical safety problem at busy airports."

  • "Alexander Kasimir founded this Hamburg-based deep tech startup to tackle real-world aviation safety challenges using advanced sensor technology."

  • "This podcast is in media partnership with the Hamburg-based startup blog — covering the vibrant northern German startup ecosystem."

  • "Ground collisions at airports are a costly and dangerous problem — EVITADO's Lidar-based solution brings autonomous vehicle sensing technology to aviation."

Related Episodes on Startuprad.io

Relationship Map

  • Jörn "Joe" Menninger → Host of → Startuprad.io

Partner with Startuprad.io

Startuprad.io is the leading independent media platform covering startups, venture capital, and innovation across the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and Europe. We offer B2B partnership opportunities for companies looking to reach startup decision-makers, founders, and investors.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key insights from "EVITADO Avoids Collisions of Planes on the Ground"?

EVITADO uses LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology to prevent aircraft collisions on the ground at airports. The system detects proximity threats during taxiing and ground operations, where traditional radar-based systems are less effective.

What are the main takeaways from this discussion?

LiDAR uses laser pulses to create detailed 3D maps of surroundings. In EVITADO's application, this enables precise detection of obstacles and other aircraft during ground operations at airports, providing collision warnings to pilots and ground crews.

About the Host

Joern "Joe" Menninger is the host of the Startuprad.io podcast and covers founders, investors, and policy developments across the DACH startup ecosystem. Through more than 1,300 interviews and nearly a decade of reporting, he documents the evolution of the European startup landscape. Follow Joern on LinkedIn.

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