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What we cover in this edition:

• How did Dryad get started?

• How did Carsten win his first customers and investors?

• Why does Dryad have 7 co-founders?

• How does Dryad make money?

• What's next for Dryad?

• How can Express Pros support you?

• Do you want to work at Dryad?

🏃 How Did They Get Started? 

The Early Days: A Telecom Pioneer Turns to Environmental Challenges

Carsten Brinkschulte and team have been serial entrepreneurs prior to founding Dryad, having founded and sold 3 businesses, including to behemoths like Blackberry and Twilio.

Looking for his next challenge in 2018, Carsten began observing heavy media coverage around wildfires in Australia, California, and the Amazon. The situation also hit close to home as Carsten’s daughter was involved in youth protests relating to the environment. All of this combined, flipped a switch to apply his expertise in Internet of Things (IoT) and telecommunications to a pressing global issue.

Dryad aims to use telecommunication and IoT to lower the impact of humanity’s most pressing challenge: climate change. Wildfires are responsible for 20% of global CO2 emissions, equivalent to the entire transportation sector. As a strong believer in the effectiveness of impact-for-profit business models, Carsten believes that Dryad can help drive positive impact against climate change, while generating positive returns for investors.

Carsten's previous startups in telecommunications laid the groundwork for Dryad's approach. Traditional wildfire detection methods were inadequate for the rapidly changing climate conditions. Dryad’s core product, Silvanet, includes gas sensors, gateways, and a cloud platform. Dryad's solution leverages IoT and mesh networking to detect wildfires at an early stage, using gas sensors to identify fires and send alerts via cloud-based infrastructure. This approach addresses the need for real-time, scalable, and cost-effective wildfire detection.

🥇 Their Firsts!

First Investor

Dryad was initially bootstrapped by the co-founders, who invested around $50,000 to develop a minimum viable product (MVP). This MVP demonstrated the basic functionality of the gas sensors, mesh network, and cloud platform. With this prototype, Dryad secured seed funding of €1.8 million in September 2020 from strategic and local investors in Berlin. In parallel to raising their seed round, Dryad’s team also applied for grant funding from €1.6 million from the European Union to invest in R&D. At this stage, Dryad had raised €3.5 million which was fully invested in taking the prototype to a MVP, which then was made ready for commercialization.

First Customer

Winning the first customer for Dryad was hard given customers wanted proof of effectiveness ahead of installation given the high-impact nature of the technology, forcing Dryad into a chicken-and-egg situation. To combat this, they engaged with pilot customers (Powerline companies) extremely early in their journey to prove out the evolving performance of their products, and provided them with low-cost or free installation initially, creating trust and credibility with their clients.

🤼 How Did They Build Their Team? 

Carsten assembled a team of 7 co-founders, each bringing expertise in critical areas like hardware design, embedded software, cloud technology, finance, and sales. 

Why 7 co-founders? Whilst most scale-ups have 1-3 co-founders, Dryad was founded with 7 co-founders. Carsten mentions that the reason for this is the level of complexity of an IoT product. They needed to design electronics, mechanical design, cloud software, embedded software, gateways, all apart from the usual start-up functions including finance or operations. The reason they chose to make them co-founders instead of regular C-suite executives was to minimize the cash burn of the business, as all co-founders did not receive pay when the business was founded. However, the downside of this approach is far lower equity for each co-founder which the Dryad Networks team is comfortable with.

💰️ How Do They Make Money? 

Go-To-Market: Dryad’s Customers and Breaking The Global Barrier

Dryad has 3 main customer groups across their 50 customers:

• Private Forestry: Timber companies that need to protect private forests.

• Municipalities: Local councils that need to promote public safety.

• Utilities: Powerline and railroad companies that want to protect their infrastructure from local fires.

Carsten stated that Dryad’s go-to-market approach is to sell their product via commercial agreements (revenue shares of around 30%) with resellers instead of selling straight to the end user.

Why through resellers? To achieve global scale. The channel model allows you to work with players that are already local to the new country that you’re trying to enter. For example, if Dryad wants to expand to Indonesia, they have no salesmen on the ground, the team will have a language and cultural barrier with Indonesian local councils. However, a reseller such as Vodafone or Bosch, which already has a team on the ground and works with these local councils as telecom or security operators, can cross-sell Dryad products to the new market with significant ease. Working with resellers outsources your sales function to an established entity.

Measuring Success

Measuring the success of a complex product like Dryad produces with basic KPIs was not the approach that Carsten wanted to go for. The numerous moving parts of the business from software performance, hardware performance, iteration rate, made only one KPI relevant for them: customer acceptance.

As an impact-for-profit business with both impact and commercial investors, in the future Dryad will be measured on metrics across:

• Impact: Number of fires prevented, CO2 emissions reduction

• Commercials: Units sold, Revenue, EBITDA

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📖 The Dryad Networks Fact Sheet

Seed Round: €3.5 Million (September 2020)

• Key Challenge: Developing a working prototype and proving the concept's viability.

• Focus: Building the core technology, including sensors, gateways, and cloud platform.

• Team Size: 12 people.

Series A: €10.5 Million (2022)

• Key Challenge: Scaling production and improving product quality.

• Focus: Industrializing the manufacturing process, expanding the team, and securing key partnerships.

• Team Size: Grew from 12 to 48 people.

Bridge Round: €6.3 Million (April 2024)

• Key Challenge: Preparing for global scale and series B fundraising.

• Focus: Expanding the C-suite, improving operational efficiency, and demonstrating commercial traction.

• Team Size: 50 people.

📈 What's Next?

Goals for the Next 12 Months:

• Raise €15 -20Mn Series B

• 3x revenue

• Sell over 100k units (up from 20k in 2023)

• Expand manufacturing capacity to 5k units per week

Long-Term Vision: Achieve “Gigacorn” Status

• Prevent 3-3.5 million hectares of forest from burning by 2030

• Save 1.4 billion tons of CO2 emissions

Dryad aims to raise a Series B round later this year, targeting €15-20 million to support global expansion. The focus will be on increasing sales, improving product features, and enhancing customer support. Dryad plans to scale their deployments to hundreds of thousands of sensors, aiming for significant impact in preventing wildfires and reducing CO2 emissions.

If you are an investor and this business sounds interesting to you, get in touch at [email protected].

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💼 Work at Dryad!

If you are interested in working at Dryad, please reach out to [email protected] if you are interested in any of the roles below: