Episode 012 | April 4, 2022 | 32:55
Guest: Malte (Inniti, co-founder)
Published: April 4, 2022
Duration: 32:55
Description
In this week’s episode we are guested by Malte Muff, co-founder of lab automation company Inniti. We talk about how he started with lab automation through his bachelor thesis with his co-founder Anders. Listen to the full story of how automating labs helps costs and benefits sustainability.
Full transcript
About this transcript
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Transforming the digital transformation of your laboratory is not done overnight. We had been schooled for three years about how this Industry 4.0 is here, the digital revolution — everything IoT and cloud-based. Then we were hit with a sledgehammer when we saw how it actually looked in industry.
Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. Today’s episode is with Malte, co-founder of Inniti, a company that digitalises labs — with implications for lab users’ time and a lot of sustainability potential through energy savings.
Malte’s path: started with me and my co-founder Anders at Aalborg University Copenhagen — manufacturing engineering. Bachelor project: lean analysis of laboratory workflow at Danish cleantech Aquaporin. We finished the analysis fast — but were shocked at how analog industry actually was. Visited other companies in the Copenhagen area; same picture even at big enterprises — digitalisation in labs just wasn’t a thing yet.
We built a small mock-up at Aquaporin that could automate quality control — saw PhDs and master’s-degree holders standing in labs doing manual repetitive work. From a production-engineering perspective, a huge waste of brain power. Founded Inniti mid-2017. Aquaporin had an “open innovation” approach — created the Aquaporin Garage where startups could test with end users. They were our first customer.
Early on we were hardware-focused — learned that’s not the right approach. There are great equipment manufacturers with decades of refinement; we had no space there. Our core mission has been: make laboratories autonomous. To do that you first need infrastructure — interconnectivity. Equipment from different manufacturers that speaks together.
Our product is the Inniti Connector — a small IoT device connected to basically any lab equipment that talks to our platform. Scientists create experiments combining equipment from various vendors. Bidirectional — both control and data extraction. Lab 4.0 will not be built by one company, even the big ones like Thermo Fisher Scientific — too great a challenge. We collaborate closely with equipment manufacturers and other software companies in the space.
Sustainability angle: we help other companies save the world faster. By freeing R&D resources and getting cleaner data earlier, we de-risk scale-up — reducing variability between R&D, pilot and production. Faster innovation cycles get life-changing products to market faster.
A lot of lab equipment has very low utilisation — once you connect it to a platform you can see “this one is only used 8% of the time, but the department has four of them.” Decentralised lab equipment everywhere has a CO2, cost and space toll. Centralising labs is a trend — saves space and equipment, but needs digitalisation to coordinate.
Predictive maintenance: instead of service contracts where the technician comes every six months regardless, we connect the equipment to cloud, see actual usage, and the manufacturer knows when service is really needed — better customer experience, less wasted maintenance trips. Some pieces of equipment also have different alarms requiring different specialists — now the customer can call the right person right away.
Some lab equipment uses the energy equivalent of one Danish household — and there are thousands of them at a single university. A whole city of energy use. People are not aware. Reporting on energy usage to management would let teams improve. Some equipment people leave running because they “think it takes forever to warm up” but with reports, they could turn it down or off when not in use.
More leverage from automation: rather than training every individual lab user, you can centrally change behavior — turning equipment on and off, notching software, etc. Out to all the machinery. We have all the foundation to map energy usage onto utilisation; it is not our main focus today but we will build it.
Inniti is now 20 people in Copenhagen — engineers, electronics, commercial, marketing. After four and a half years we feel we are just getting started. Some of the biggest Danish and Dutch enterprises onboarded in the last months.
Advice for leaders: phase 1 — pick one lab or one process and digitalise that. Run an agile pilot for 2-3 months, learn, then implement in the next five labs incorporating those learnings. Don’t try to flip the whole organisation overnight.
Contact: initi.dk (soon initi.io). Thanks Malte — looking forward to another episode on the practical barriers and sustainability benefits. Thanks for listening — check out the related Green Labs episode with Nicoline and our newsletter at greeninnovationgroup.com.