Supporting entrepreneurs is supporting growth, innovation, and ideas that have the power to change the world we live in. That’s why here at Eagerwoks we’ve always been keen on paving the way for startups to pass through all their stages successfully. Luckily, we were able to see many of them succeed, and two of them are now one step away from taking their companies to the next level. They’re Vopero and Naxon Labs. 
Wanna know what they are into? They were selected by the Santander X Award in Uruguay. Santander X Award gives entrepreneurs the chance to be known around the world and get economic support for their ideas. This year in Uruguay 47 startups joined the competition but only 6 made it to the final stage to win a trip to Valencia, Spain, to be part of Santander Global Award with other 42 ventures from 7 different countries.

Santander X Award 2022, a project created by Santander Universidades, had two categories: Launch and Accelerate. Both Vopero and Naxon Labs were selected for the Accelerate one. Furthermore, Eldes, a startup whose founders we had the pleasure of meeting when they were taking their first steps, was awarded in this category too.
So far, Santander Universidades has helped +630 thousand students, professionals, and entrepreneurs around the world with +2 million euros and agreements with more than 1 thousand universities and institutions in 11 countries. 

We’re thrilled to introduce you to the startups that achieved almost the final stage of this competition and that made their first steps with Eagerworks. Let’s check out what they do and how we helped them. 

 

Vopero: A sustainable fashion project, a seven-million-dollar investment
 

Circular and trendy clothing was a market that no digital platform addressed in such an innovative way until Vopero came in. The Vopero team knocked at our door with a challenging objective: creating a web and mobile application that let a great number of sellers and buyers connect to sell or get second-hand clothes. That app had to be scalable, as they were planning to launch it soon in other Latam countries soon, as well as easy to use, so anyone could add different services and products. 

This resale fashion app idea came to life in an extremely short period of 4 to 5 months. We built up a team to work especially on each step of it, developing the back office, the back end, and the mobile app. How did we do it? On one hand, we created a solid microservices architecture in Node.js so we could scale easily and fast. Plus, this complex architecture had the power to support millions of users. On the other hand, this application relied on Node.js and React and that made possible and more efficient the whole processes of collecting, presenting, and distributing thousands of products.

What’s the state of this app? It’s being widely used in Uruguay and Mexico by thousands of users. Recently, they’ve earned a strategic investment of $7.5 million from Grupo Axo and ThredUp. This last achievement is connected to the fact that at Eagerworks we strived to reach a first version as similar as possible to the final one. This enabled Vopero to present their product to investors and pitch successfully. The key is thinking of a solid product from the very start.

 

Naxon: Paving the way for healthcare improvements 

Now, technology is at the center of everything, including medicine. And brain-comper interfaces (BCI) are making sure it sticks to that, laying the foundation for future hardware and software ventures that will truly have an impact on the way people study medicine and even on the way doctors help patients heal.

With that in mind, Naxon, a BCI software that works with portable, low-cost electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment, decided to start solving some challenges that this kind of technology was facing. Among those challenges we find:

• You had to have thousands of dollars to have an EEG;
• The software wasn’t user-friendly;
• The software didn’t have subscription models, you were only able to pay a one-time fee that costs you thousands of dollars. 

Note that BCI software that works with EEG equipment has many applications that have a great impact on healthcare. For example, you can use them for clinical psychology, medicine, sleep, well-being, engineering, and educational psychology. 

The proposal that Naxon was creating had some challenges too. For instance, we had to deal with the interaction of the Muse headband and a web browser, users must be able to get data, process, and see it on a webpage, and the architecture needed to be strong enough to support storing the EEG data in almost real-time for later session playback. So, as you can imagine, we had to solve quite an interesting performance challenge. And we did. 

We followed the path that Naxon had in mind by creating a friendly web application in Ruby on Rails. In just a few months, a beta version was being tested with 150 users. The result was a production-ready SaaS product that has the power to scale to thousands of users.

The first version included an administrator interface and user portal, and let users connect to a Bluetooth-enabled, low-cost EEG, read data in real-time, and check out and store all the information. And communication isn’t a problem because from the frontend to the backend and vice versa, it relies on WebSockets using ActionCable, so there are no delay issues when opening and closing connections. 

We’re really looking into the future and it seems it’ll bring some machine-learning applications to this project. They’re thinking about including this technology to study and identify users’ emotions when they’re using the EEG.

 

We invest in startups, we invest in the future

We help entrepreneurs succeed not only by creating the tech products they need to make their projects a reality. At Eagerworks, we support local entrepreneurs throughout the venture process starting with teaming up and designing a path to follow in terms of validations, roadmaps, and even networks, including investments. For instance, we invested in a thriving Uruguayan startup, PlanIT. You can have a look at our work here.

Recognitions like the ones Vopero and Naxon received only make us want to broaden even more the support we bring to local entrepreneurs. We’re looking forward to meeting the next Uruguayan venture that will make a splash in the global tech entrepreneur arena.