This is Koster’s second successive stint at the Web Summit, but the company has already come a long way, reaching a turnover of €2.5m this year, having started with an investment of €250,000 by its four founders. 

And Koster is optimistic about finding partners in a number of vertical targets--from industry, logistics and hospitals, to city and country players--which he tells Delano will help the platform build a case study repository upon which it will be able to rapidly scale up.

Koster confirmed they’re already working with one city based in the Netherlands, but they also are anticipating signing with a “small country” by the end of the week to make it a smart one--although he wouldn’t yet reveal which country. 

“Everything is linked to digitalisation of the economy. 5G and IoT will be a massive driver to do that,” he says. The company has five competence centres to “future proof the now”: one in design to humanise technology, one in engineering innovation; a digital centre to transform big data; industries to enable connectivity and analytics for augmenting human intelligence. The combination of its 5G, IOT, AI and connectivity capabilities provides a service-as-a-platform via its cloudified, AliBaba-supported “XBrain”. 

Koster is currently spending most of his time abroad and says, “When you go to a city and ask if they want to be sustainable, they say yes. But when you ask them if they know how to, they say no.” Esplendor is currently based in Luxembourg and Munich. 

Koster added that he wished there had been a Luxembourg stand at the Web Summit, which may have helped offset the high cost Esplendor incurred by setting up their own stand.