We wanted to hear from founder Aleksandar Filipov how it all started – and to learn from both Aleksandar & co-founder Per Sigurson about the long-term ambitions with RemotiveLabs.
I’m a software guy, I love iterating things. I had a lot of ideas when I started working in the automotive industry but the reality I faced was instead of building and testing we mostly worked with envisioning features that could hopefully be released years ahead. It didn’t suit me at all.
I’m a software guy, I love iterating things.
Founder – Aleksandar Filipov
I realized that the frustration I felt was not company-specific but across all major automotive OEMs. The automotive industry, with its historical setup and industrial legacy, was not able to accommodate well the modern & iterative software development I was used to. I started thinking that I can either be this frustrated person or I can try and build the future I want. I found a development car in a garage, and I identified a complicated way to connect it to a computer – for the first time I could try out new code and get feedback right away. From there on I continued trying new paths and it was when I found Erlang/Elixir that I realized that I’m onto something substantial here. Simply put, I saw a match between the technology and the problems that need solving.
I would say three things – showing by doing, that we are where we are now with the competent team we have and that together we start to look like a real company. I’m super proud that we’ve created this place where our people can come to work, and that they believe in what we do. We’ve created this possibility, now it’s our responsibility together to deliver on it – for me that is magical. For a while there it just looked like I had a very expensive and idiotic hobby project, not finding the right people in the early days, not to mention the struggle to get the first project validations through. I made a list of people in my network I really thought could help me out on this journey and the first key recruitment was Per Sigurdson, my co-founder and CEO, who joined in September 2021.
We want to democratize software engineering in the automotive industry. All software engineers, independent of their industrial background, should be able to build great things in the automotive industry. Perhaps we don’t do things in the obvious or anticipated way but our primary driving force is seeing things happen right away. Automotive software engineers shouldn’t have to settle for abstract things that may happen years ahead. We want to mobilize a community by building a collaboration platform that simplifies and makes everything adaptable for a software-centric process. Software engineers need to take ownership to deliver to their full potential.
We are in a great place to start scaling globally with our automotive software development tooling! We have already shown that we help software engineers get stuff done and reduce development time. To continue working on our ambitious backlog we are expanding the development team in Malmö and we are looking for our third(!) office since I joined (edit: in May 2023 RemotiveLabs moved to their office on floor 4 in Media Evolution city). Besides that, we are ramping up our efforts to establish ourselves in the marketplace to grow our international customer base.
We are working towards our vision of enabling OEMs and partners to collaboratively develop entire software platforms in the cloud and not to mention; to become the de-facto standard platform for the development of automotive software.
