For its twentieth anniversary, FiveCo invents THEye, a 100% Swiss-made technology
THEye is one of the many milestones marking twenty years of innovative engineering. Mont-sur-Lausanne-based FiveCo will have the pleasure of celebrating this anniversary in September.
THEye: the IoT black box the world was waiting for
As a logistics professional, you need to transport a product that must be kept at a constant temperature. As a museum curator, you need to keep a watchful eye on an exhibition loaned to you by another institution. Before FiveCo invented THEye, there was no secure solution for these seemingly basic professional needs. Developed by FiveCo, this Bluetooth module measures temperature and humidity in a secure manner. CE and IP68 certified, extremely robust, barely the size of a two-franc coin, it is highly responsive to environmental variations. It offers a battery life of over 8 years, with a reading taken every 10 seconds. It also incorporates an encrypted security system that restricts access to its data exclusively to the module's owner. "It is through stories like this that we understand the mechanism of invention: the pull of a need and an engineer's ability to meet it come together to define a new market of international scope — and, to this day, without competition," says Antoine Lorotte, one of FiveCo's founders.
Innovations for your businesses — and innovations "by FiveCo"
Since its founding, FiveCo has applied its versatility to innovative engineering through five core areas of expertise: embedded electronics, mechanics, programming (apps, software, servers…), design, and craftsmanship. It offers its services to companies that need to outsource their innovations in the fields of industry, watchmaking, luxury, metrology, medical, automotive, and robotics. The company has had the opportunity to bring its skills to bear for prestigious brands in Switzerland and around the world, resulting in a long list of achievements: the Raptor display stand for Hublot, Fusion Explorer, PulsoGraph, and Watchtester for Dietlin, inductive energy transfer and communication, a battery management system for Nissan, the Emperador cigar case for Imperial, the X-Smart iQ hand interface for Dentsply Maillefer, high-speed opto-electronic connectivity for Fischer Connectors… a wealth of innovations that can be found on their new website.
Alongside innovations developed for clients, there are also "by FiveCo" projects: original, proprietary developments. THEye is one such example — a 100% original technology conceived, designed, and developed from the ideas of FiveCo's own engineers. Other "by FiveCo" brands have also come to life, including Art of Secrets, Mémoire du Vin, and more recently the Around Five clock, now distributed at over thirty points of sale worldwide.
20 years of shared values
"Our clients often ask us how we manage to innovate across such different fields. Our answer is simple: for twenty years, we have shared the same values — among our partners and with our employees," Antoine Lorotte remarks. It is a worldview centred on innovation through solving complex problems — one that the engineers at this firm like to sum up with a quote from Mark Twain: "We didn't know it was impossible, so we did it." Team spirit, service, the pursuit of excellence, Swiss-made quality, respect for tradition, passion, industrial sensibility, the pursuit of exclusivity, a love of beauty… For twenty years, these values have driven the women and men of FiveCo. They are what made past innovations possible and will, without a doubt, make future ones possible for many years to come.
