Pieter Krynauw shares his career history and how ThruWave is applying millimeter wave tech to save retailers millions in fraudulent returns.
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Danny:
- Well hello and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I'm Danny Gonzales, and today my guest is a company called ThruWave. I have Pieter Krynauw who is the CEO. We met at MODEX in 2022, and so I'm super excited to have you join me today, Pieter.
Pieter:
- Hey, thank you. Nice to be with you guys.
Danny:
- Well this is exciting. You guys have some really interesting technology. There's been several awards that you guys have won over the last several years. For those who aren't familiar with who you guys are, who ThruWave is, give me a little bit of a high-level of who you are and what you do.
Pieter:
- Yeah, sure. At a high level, we're a small start-up based in Seattle. We've just developed some amazing, ground-breaking millimeter wave ocular vision technology that can sense through cardboard, plastic, at very high speeds making it a great solution to inspect packages that move along a conveyor. We construct a 3D digital image of what's inside a cardboard box or a plastic tote providing the ability to verify quantity, condition, content for our supply chain customers. We use simple hardware technology like this, and then it's all software to analyze and support our customers.
Danny:
- Excellent. That's pretty cool. I remember we demoed it; I think we did some video content there. It seemed like it was very interesting technology. We'll get into that here in a little bit more in the episode, but right now we're going to pivot, go to one of my favorite sections just to learn a little bit more about you, Pieter. I want to learn about your background, how you got to where you are, hear your story a little bit. Take me back; how did you get into this space? Was it something that, did you go to school for engineering? What was that?
Pieter:
- Yeah, it's a long journey and a longer story. I grew up in South Africa. After college I moved to the UK, probably had a plane ticket and £100 in my pocket. Might've been a little bit more, but it didn't feel like a lot at the time. I had some software and computer networking training at the time. This being the late 90s, I was able to find a really nice job at a small data company in the UK, and I had the opportunity to work with just some fantastic customers, a wide variety of customers in the UK which was really fantastic for me as a young person, young professional. I returned to South Africa after about two years in the UK, did an MBA, and I was fortunate enough to get an opportunity with Honeywell. We had a large contract with South Africa's largest petrochemical company, so I jumped straight into the fire. I worked myself up, sideways, up again, into various positions in South Africa, the Middle East, China, and into the US working in a variety of roles, mostly in process automation, industrial process automation. Honeywell then acquired a material handling company a few years after I got to the US. I went over shortly after to lead that business. That's the short story of how I got into the supply chain space.
Danny:
- Excellent. Through that journey—obviously we got the short, we got the abridged version. Totally get it. I'm sure there's a lot of things that probably,