Evelyn Bejan former Digital MBA student meets Co-Founder Samir Brahimi to discuss the digitalisation of the horse industry. To illustrate the performance of connected stables, Evelyn says she had the chance to talk with Equicty, a startup founded in 2015 at the forefront of technology in this field. The company offers two SaaS digital solutions EquStable and EquClub for optimized management of stables and equestrian clubs based on the cloud. The interview aims to gain insights into the digitalization of the management of stables and equestrian centres. Equicty is a start-up at the forefront of innovation in this sector. According to Samir Brahimi: “The digital transformation of stables is at the very beginning.” This interview explains why.
By Evelyn Bejan
Digitalisation of the horse industry occurs when software companies such as equicty provide solutions to horse businesses. Equstable is a virtual assistant for planning the daily activities of the stables. It centralises all the information in real time around the stables and their stakeholders. The platform allows for the management of financial activity with competition revenues and costs stored and invoiced. Operational management allows health and competition reports to be stored and easily accessed. Owners, staff and veterinarians can be given access to enter health and training information: deworming, veterinary appointments and treatment plans, and vaccination records.
Equclub is a community management platform that works with financial and horse information from equstable. Equclub allows you to pay for riding lessons online. Equestrian clubs are the persona that sells lessons to connected members. There are 2 portals in equclub: a members portal and an administrators portal. Both portals can access the lesson booking feature, the members of which can book and pay and the administrator which makes the lessons available for booking and can manage the status of payments. Information flows between equclub and equstable: about horses, membership information and lesson reservations.
Equid is a cloud-based solution consisting of mobile applications where veterinarians can log in to perform the identifications of the equidae. We developed a state of the art sketching technique allowing vets to mark horses from a pre-filled registration record on the iPad and complete the identification details such as sketching the horse’s markings. Veterinarians can register their identification in no time and send it in real-time to the database of your governmental services. It also includes a back office system for the competent authorities to follow up with the identifications. The system allows the linking of various external data sources so that information can be exchanged quickly and securely with existing systems. Our solution has already registered more than 20,000 identifications, has been thoroughly tested and successfully deployed by some of the largest studbooks in the world.
This optimised digital management of the stables allows a huge saving of time and money over a year estimated at -40% and operational administration or approximately -1 FTE (full time equivalent) per year in a stable/ riding club having 2 administrative staff which is equivalent to -€50.000. The turnover of the start-up is confidential, but to give you an idea of the size of the business, 10,000 users and 300 stables per year use equicty’s solutions. However, client stables vary in size. On average, client stables have between 50 and 70 horses, giving an annual price of €2,000, which implies a net gain of €48,000 per year for a medium-sized stable. This online solution is sold in 30 countries, the main ones being: United States, Australia, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined by builtin as ‘a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence’. Where as Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as ‘how we describe the digitally connected universe of everyday physical devices. These devices are embedded with internet connectivity, sensors and other hardware that allow communication and control via the web’.
Equicty is working on on a very innovative project involving IoT and AI that make it an innovative start-up that stands out from the competition.
They call it Hoof-Mate: the tracking of horse movements 24/7 with sensors in the horse’s hoof. The objective is to create a health application where any anomaly is monitored to prevent health problems. These sensors allow to analyse the energy consumption of the horse, the prediction of health or detection of stress or any strange behaviour in the canter, the trot, or the walk. The sensors in the hoof of the horse are IoT that collect data which is then processed by AI and allows to generate models to analyse for the movements of the horse to detect the early stage of colic, a very common disease in horses.
Multiple stakeholders are mobilized around this project. NXP, a manufacturer of semiconductors, is building sensors in the horse’s hoof that record and analyze the horse’s movements. Tests are carried out by the universities of biology and veterinary. The universities and laboratories generate the DATA analysis models with AI. This solution will soon be scientifically proven with a patent.
Stable management software is not common. The digital transformation is in its infancy. Many stables are still using Excel/paper. Equicty has done a lot of evangelism of its technology over the last 3 or 4 years. The most technologically advanced countries like France, Belgium, UK, Australia, Canada and the US are very open to digital solutions. Equicty offers much more than just a CRM. A CRM doesn’t offer the linkage of horses to stables and riding schools, financial information and planning of daily racing or training operations. Equicty’s technology can be applied to other breeding sectors, but for now the start-up is focused on optimizing stable management.
If you require a digital solution to help you improve your organization and efficiency in your stable, try equicty. Save time, money, and stress by finding the best way to manage your horses, team and administration. Try equicty’s 21-day free trial today and receive expert support during setup.
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