Smart maintenance platform Amygda’s mission to (un)disrupt industries
An interview with Faizan Patankar, CEO & Founder, on how and why they make sure machines don’t break.
The digital era has evolved our relationship with machines into one that is much more intimate. We have access to real-time information on machine health, and like the healthcare industry, we are moving towards predictive (preventative) maintenance (care) .
The aerospace industry ushered in digitalisation in quite a disorganised manner — creating a fragmented digital ecosystem of bespoke platforms that don’t speak to each other. As Amygda CEO and founder Faizan Patankar puts it:
“It’s like walking into a GP and the doctor saying, ‘well I can only look at a certain kind of people, I’m not going to monitor anybody else, and I’m not going to diagnose what’s happening with you’.”
Amygda is a data observability platform for smart maintenance in high-value asset industries. Founded at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, this remote-first (Derby-based) startup is driven by an extremely sharp-witted and smart team who have strong backgrounds in engineering, data science, business operations and B2B marketing.
In this interview, Faizan shares his candid observations about aerospace’s digital systems. He starts by reframing the problem of a fragmented digital ecosystem from a customer, rather than an OEM’s perspective. Then, Patankar draws from his 8 years of experience at Rolls-Royce’s engine health monitoring team to highlight how aerospace should continually innovate in this digitising world, drawing parallels from the banking industry.
“…There’s literally nothing you love more that you’re so unprepared for.”
As a first-time founder, Patankar shares how he navigates the vast uncertainties an early-stage startup inevitably faces. Finally, he also offers his honest opinions on his experience participating in the Aerospace Xelerated programme.
Can you explain Amygda in one sentence?
Amygda is like health monitoring for machines. It observes what machines are doing and diagnoses the most likely next best action to take.
What problem are you solving?
In the aerospace industry, apart from the aircraft engines — which is what most people see — there are millions of other systems and components acting up. And these systems are generally provided by Tier One, Tier Two or Tier Three suppliers who haven’t got the means and time to focus on digitalisation. And yet we know that more of these systems are going to be connected.
We’re focusing on providing customers, who don’t have access to digitalisation tools and teams, a tested and validated platform to build new solutions on. So they can move to a new model of business which is servitisation — focusing on making sure their parts are more available, sustainable and as efficiently operational as possible. And all of this requires a lot of effort.
We’ve built solutions that have taken three to five years, and now we’re providing customers access to build the same solutions in 3–6 months.
Within OEMs like Boeing and GKN Aerospace, what are the barriers that are preventing digitalisation efforts?
Within their own organisations, I wouldn’t say they have barriers. There are probably cultural barriers present in every organisation that we’ve seen we’ve worked with and been a part of.
But if you look at it from the customer side or external organisations, nobody just works with Boeing or just GKN, a customer has aircraft from Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and other solutions.
So, from a customer perspective, digitalisation looks different. For them, it’s how do we bring all of these assets together and look at them together? Whilst for Boeing and other companies, they’re very focused on their platforms, their equipment, and their assets. It’s like walking into a GP and the doctor saying, “well I can only look at a certain kind of people, I’m not going to monitor anybody else, and I’m not going to diagnose what’s happening with you”. So, you would not expect that, and you wouldn’t accept it either.
That’s what customers today are doing. They’re practically looking at five different platforms because none of them would actually work with each other. I don’t think there’s a challenge in digitalisation internally — I believe there would be. But from a customer perspective, nobody’s focused on the customers to say, how do we bring this together for them.
What happens if there are Tier One suppliers who also provide digitalisation — do we then log into 20 different platforms?
So I think the challenges are the lack of data connection with different companies and having this collaborative approach.
That’s how we architected the solution when we started from a blank slate. We said we would be customer first and OEM second. We will be equipment agnostic; we will not discriminate against equipment
What’s your experience before launching Amygda and how was the idea born?
Before launching Amygda, I spent eight years with Rolls-Royce. My co-founder and I were part of the same team focusing on engine health monitoring. And a lot of my time spent at Rolls-Royce was helping them build their equipment health monitoring platform — which monitors engines, but only Rolls-Royce engines.
Whilst we’re building the solutions and going to different sessions and speaking to customers, the usual problem we would hear is, “this is great but we actually own a lot of equipment from different companies as well. So, we like what you’re doing but how about doing it for other systems?”. And it was just not possible.
So platforms were built with the same approach, even after Rolls Royce built their own, and we recognize it. We need to look at the architecture again.
If you look back in the early decades of banking, think about where banking is today in the UK and where it was then — and all of the new banks and folks who have re-architected the solutions to be more open, more collaborative. They rapidly grew and forced the industry to take a different approach of not being closed.
That’s what we’re doing.
As a background, I’ve always been an engineer. And I recognise that engineering is great but we are moving more from principle-first engineering into application-first engineering. We knew that software and data would play a larger part. We know that because we are in discussions with companies like insurance companies who say that data has an impact on everything. And everything you see has evolved to something on a personal basis — personal health, personal insurance, personal banking. We think that the same model will apply on the business side as well.
[If you’re interested about Amygda’s founding journey, we highly recommend reading Faizan blog post: Building the next industrial venture.]
What has been the greatest learning from your startup journey so far?
We started Amygda two years ago, just before the pandemic lockdowns started in the UK. There have been a lot of learnings, and the biggest learning is, there’s literally nothing you love more that you’re so unprepared for.
It doesn’t matter what I say, you have to go through it.
Is there anything people should look forward to this year for Amygda?
This year is super exciting. We’re doing some experiments now, and we can’t wait to showcase how data and finance in the industrial domain will come together.
How was your experience at Aerospace Xelerated?
It was great!
It was quite deep — the sessions went into lots of detail and, despite being virtual, they were all quite interactive.
The cohort members are amazing. When you see some of the other startup founders or leading operators share their experience, you realise what an incredible community of people you’re part of.
The Boeing and GKN team have been great. In particualr, the network they’ve helped us introduced to has been amazing. In the truest sense, what would have taken us about 6, 12 months of building relationships and finding the right people has been accelerated into just the first six weeks of the programme.
Hear Faizan Patankar share more about Amygda and their next steps at Aerospace Xelerated — 2022 Demo Day
Stay up to date with Amygda’s journey on LinkedIn and Twitter. Patankar also regularly writes on his personal blog.
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