Fortune on Startup BoldIQ Adds Legendary Software Exec Paul Maritz to Board
Paul Maritz, the former chief executive at VMware VMW -2.56% and Pivotal after a stint as a top exec at Microsoft, is joining the board of BoldIQ.
The Bellevue, Wash. company focuses on helping companies allocate and schedule big, expensive resources—airplanes, trucks, medical technicians—efficiently, using technology built at Dayjet, a company that helped business people share private jets.
Maritz has history here. He invested in Dayjet, which had great technology but bad timing. “The short version is that I inherited BoldIQ out of Dayjet which was ahead of its time, trying to be the Uber for the private jet business 15 years ago. Unfortunately, it didn’t survive the crash of 2008,” Maritz told Fortune in an interview.
But Dayjet’s scheduling and logistics technology lives on in BoldIQ.
The BoldIQ-Uber comparison only goes so far, Maritz said. “Uber doesn’t require as complex a model because it draws on a huge number of drivers. The air taxi business deals with precious resources. Being able to efficiently schedule them to get more than one passenger on each plane required advanced software,” he noted.
BoldIQ, which has raised just under $8 million in venture funding, is applying that technology to all sorts of businesses including freight delivery, home appliance repairs, hospital staff scheduling, and, yes, aviation.
The appliance service model is illustrative. In the Seattle area, one unnamed BoldIQ customer is able to perform 1000 home appliance service calls per day using 100 technicians. “We have to make sure two things happen, one that the company can provide most of the services needed and two how to do it in a way that’s timely for customers and prevents overwork by employees,” said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of BoldIQ.
Using BoldIQ, service companies can schedule repair calls on the fly so if one technician calls in sick or shows up to an empty house, the schedule can be adjusted accordingly, said Ganzarski.
BoldIQ competes with products like IBM’s IBM -0.01% iLog optimization engine as well as home-grown solutions.
“We also compete with not-invented-here syndrome,”Ganzarski said. His take is that BoldIQ can help aircraft companies, hospitals, and doctors schedule resources in a way that’s more efficient for both the provider and the consumer of the service, without any of those providers having to build their own scheduling system.
So what’s BoldIQ’s secret ingredient for handling all this complexity? “Russian rocket scientists,” Maritz and Ganzarski said almost in unison. “We’re not kidding,” Maritz added. The company’s team profile does indicate the presence of quite a few Russian techies..
The company claims JetSuite, GlobeAir, and Jeppeson, a unit of Boeing BA -0.76% , as customers.
“If you can help an aircraft operator cut 50% of costs and make 20% more flights, everyone wins,” he noted. BoldIQ takes a cut of any savings.
Businesses can run BoldIQ’s software on Amazon AMZN 1.18% Web Services, Microsoft MSFT 1.86% Azure public clouds, or on their own internal systems, Ganzarski said.