From traffic radars to watchmaking: the rich journey of a young Lausanne company
Engineering — An expert firm founded by five EPFL students, FiveCo made its name helping police forces read number plates from radar images. It is now diversifying into motor control via microcard.
Nicolas Dufour
A turnover set to at least double this year compared to 2006: even if the figures remain modest, FiveCo is in good shape. With revenues of CHF 875,000 in the first half of the year, this start-up — involved notably in designing the glass-free display stand known as the "Raptor" — is planning to grow. It has become the first former protégé of its mentor Genilem to turn sponsor. Quite a trajectory for a small company that gave little indication of such take-off in its early days.
Based at the EPFL Science Park, FiveCo was founded in 2002 by five engineers from the same graduating class and the same microtechnology department at the "Poly". They had already worked together on designing robots for Expo.02. Their initial business model defied expert advice: no sales staff, no marketing specialists, no external funding beyond their own capital. Over time, Antoine Lorotte took over management and administration, while the engineers focused on their core expertise.
In its early phase, the company positioned itself as a consulting engineering firm — "a way of generating income while we launched ourselves in all directions on the project side," Antoine Lorotte recalls. To build the company's profile, the young graduates set out to develop a product.
Eighteen months for an algorithm
Somewhat surprisingly, it would be in the service of tracking motorists. Having learned that the Vaud cantonal police were dissatisfied with the software available for reading number plates on radar photographs — Swiss plates being too small for foreign software — a FiveCo specialist spent eighteen months developing a fit-for-purpose algorithm.
Reading the signs
The challenge was considerable: the plate first had to be located within the radar image, where it might occupy as little as 0.6% of the frame, at varying angles. Then the system had to recognise the letters and digits. Police camera data is encrypted, and the interface varies by software; FiveCo's contribution is limited to extracting the character string from the plate.
Officers still carry out a visual check, but the processing saves valuable time. FiveCo's software recognises Swiss plates as well as French, German, Italian, and Dutch ones — since while plate formats are standardised within the EU, character syntaxes and fonts differ.
Among others, the police forces of Vaud (the cantonal force as well as those of Morges and the Riviera), Fribourg, Schwyz, and Ticino have adopted the system.
The engineers then turned to embedded electronics, designing motor control boards for all kinds of applications. Their distinctive features, as their inventors are keen to point out, are their compact size and their ability to communicate via Ethernet. They can be fitted inside small assembly machines, machine tools, or welding equipment, and even in mobile robotics.
The Swiss cross: a quality label
These cards are manufactured in Ticino and stamped with the national flag — "always a quality label," assures Antoine Lorotte, a Frenchman who came to study at EPFL for the richness of its campus and the versatility of microtechnology.
FiveCo itself is no less versatile — to the point where it is hard to pin down the core of the start-up's business. "The message was difficult to get across at first, but launching products — software and control cards — allowed us to showcase our expertise," Antoine Lorotte reflects.
The company's service activity, developing systems particularly in robotics, still accounts for a significant share of revenues, around 70%. The engineers have completed around fifty projects, the most publicised of which was Raptor, designed by FiveCo and BlueBotics for Dietlin — the "glass-free display case". Thanks to infrared sensors and small motors, the displayed watch instantly retreats into the stand if a curious visitor leans too close.
The PSE company has also developed image processing systems for Marcel Aubert SA, conducted studies for Nespresso, created a light animation device for showcasing watchmaking products, and designed the technical concept for an electronic hourglass for conference speakers who tend to run over time…
A broad palette
The palette is wide and, while lacking a precise industrial focus, it allows the company to serve a varied clientele and thus limit economic dependence on any single sector. Always focused on their craft — multi-faceted as it may be — the young engineers have not sought to sell their products themselves.
The licence plate recognition software is commercialised, integrated into a software suite, by Epsilon, a Basel-area company specialising in products for public authorities.
The control cards, meanwhile, are distributed through a network of 22 distributors. FiveCo will soon bring on a sixth specialist, and its head plans to increase the share of product sales in the revenues of a company that has thoroughly confounded conventional business planning.
