This article is part of a new series profiling University of Wisconsin alumni contributing to Wisconsin’s growing innovation economy.
It’s no secret that Wisconsin is home to an especially large manufacturing base. While many of these companies hope to migrate over to an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, only a minority have the necessary expertise and resources to do so in-house.
One major obstacle to this migration is establishing a reliable and secure network connection to sensor-equipped machines and devices, and subsequently streaming massive amounts of data to the cloud.
Caravela and its associated company Stack41, founded by UWM grad Ian Favill and business partner Ryan Brooks, provide a B2C solution to this common pain point. Stack41 operates a private cloud for mission-critical applications and Caravela provides the networking and machine learning tools necessary to gather and analyze the accumulated data from those applications.
They partner with the Data Holdings Data Center in Milwaukee that provides physical hosting space and is, according to Favill, “a gem in Wisconsin.” Favill notes the importance of having local data centers to support an Internet of Things-oriented product to avoid the inherent performance issues associated with such latency-sensitive applications.
Stack41 has existed since 2014, while Caravela was launched more recently when a customer in the water reclamation industry described a need for machines to make intelligent decisions to help manage the process of cleaning water used in industrial processes. Favill says that they didn’t realize that they were actually describing a machine learning application to make changes in a more timely fashion and enable new and differentiated services for their customers.
Though the company’s primary focus is the manufacturing and industrial process industries in Wisconsin, the applications for Caravela’s services are virtually unlimited. IoT is set to revolutionize industries as diverse as transportation, energy, and biotechnology. Another example of Caravela’s utility is working with a local brewery to collect and analyze real-time data from the brewing process.
In addition, Stack41 and Data Holdings offer FreeCloud, a service that provides no-cost cloud computing resources for local startups. Their aim is to accelerate the trajectory for data-centric Wisconsin startups who might otherwise lack the expertise and funding for these specialized resources.
Favill and Brooks represent the type of forward-thinking, altruistic mentality that will further the Wisconsin Idea and “retain entrepreneurial and technical talent in Southeastern Wisconsin,” ushering in a new era for the state’s innovation economy.
About the Author: Andy is a 5th-year MD/PhD Candidate at the Medical College of Wisconsin with interests in medicine, biomedical research, the humanities, and innovation. He is also a member of the Golden Angels Advisors, MCW’s Postdoc Industry Consulting Organization, and a Community Engagement Fellow at Bascom Ventures
