JD Durkin: Igor Marinelli, CEO of Tractian, a physical AI and industrial operations platform. We’ve been looking forward to our chat. Thanks for stopping by the show today.
Igor Marinelli: Thank you so much. It’s very exciting. I woke up feeling like a doctor today.
JD Durkin: Okay, well, talk to me, first and foremost. What are the main problems that you would describe Tractian as actually going about solving? And given you’re a co-founder, how did all this first start?
Igor Marinelli: Absolutely. Exciting to be here. You know, I actually was staying at the Holiday Inn next door, so good recommendation there. You know, at Tractian, we’re fundamentally solving this $1 trillion problem, which is unplanned downtime, right? So we all know it. We’ve all felt it. You know, the goods that essentially don’t arrive in time for your home, for our customers. And we’re tackling this with technology and AI, essentially.
JD Durkin: That’s awesome. You started really before the heart of the so-called current AI boom. You now have a huge physical AI tailwind.
Igor Marinelli: Yes.
JD Durkin: How has that iterated or changed the business as the overall market cycle has evolved?
Igor Marinelli: Yes. Think about a data center currently, right? Everybody is talking about the GPUs and the chips, and so all the attention is there. But when you zoom out, what do you see? You see assets that are 24 years old, that the manufacturers put in there, that are the same technology as decades ago, right? So you have the same chiller that’s doing the refrigeration of the water. You have the same HVAC that doesn’t have any embedded technology. You have evaporators that are spending water. You have transformers that are consuming electricity. And when you don’t have a technology like Tractian, you have to bet on redundancy to meet 100% of your SLA. But redundancy is also very expensive, right? And it’s not guaranteed that things will work as smoothly as they should.
JD Durkin: Walk me through a single machine. What is the platform actually here? What do we need? What goes into it? What comes out of it, if we were looking at this thing for the first time?
Igor Marinelli: Absolutely. So the product is fundamentally information. It’s information, just like Bloomberg, right? We’re here, you know, you’re getting the information of tomorrow’s asset. So, what should you do with your asset, right? So, you know, what we are doing is essentially predicting the future with today’s data, and it’s very attractive. It starts with 88% assertiveness. As the customers interact with the platform, they upload their data sheets, their equipment, they talk. There’s a memory concept, and it quickly gets to 95% assertiveness.
And now you can trust the system to essentially guide you on which asset you’re going to maintain today, which asset you’re maintaining tomorrow, and which one you can leave for a year from now. That is not a problem, right? And you have to understand, with our customers, their team is not scaling as they scale with us. So the same three users that were dealing with ten machines now deal with 100 or 1,000.
JD Durkin: There you go. We’re really grateful for the time and the much-needed context to better help us understand what’s at stake here. Come by and see us on the show anytime. Good to have you.
Igor Marinelli: Absolutely. Thank you.
JD Durkin: Igor Marinelli, CEO and co-founder at Tractian.
