Name: Shivani Shah
Company: Samp
Position: CTO and co-founder
Website: https://samp.ai/
About Shivani Shah
Shivani Shah is CTO and co-founder of Samp, a company which uses patented AI and 3D technology to automatically build a virtual 3D replica of an industrial site in just a few days.
Its solution, Shared Reality, uniquely uses AI to identify assets and connect them with their corresponding technical information (such as diagrams and blueprints), creating an interactive digital workspace for teams to collaborate on. It also acts as a single source of truth for data of an industrial site. As this improves safety, there are reduced risks of industrial accidents, and it also brings operational efficiency for inspection and maintenance on sites daily.
Driven by a curiosity about how the world works, Shivani has always been passionate about scientific subjects. After studying in her home country India and then France, Shivani pursued a PhD at the French Nuclear Research Agency, where she developed AI techniques for big data. Here she realised that her motivation lay in building technology to tackle real-life problems. Being immersed in the business environment of Gujarat for many years, she was motivated to launch a startup where she could work on developing deep tech and build a profitable product which had an impact.
The idea for Samp emerged when Shivani, fresh out of her PhD in 2019, met her co-founder and CEO Laurent Bourgouin for a coffee at the world’s biggest startup campus, STATION F. Shivani became aware of how ageing industrial facilities were struggling with their technical data and documentation, stopping them from accelerating their transformation. As soon as she heard this, she saw the huge potential in the latest 3D AI research and how it could be applied to this problem.
The journey of Samp started with just the two founders and today they have over 30 team members. To build the product, there has been significant deep tech innovation. For example, Samp’s AI engine detects industrial objects in an industrial scene. Or building rendering technology to stream extremely large industrial sites on the web for teams to collaborate on.
Alongside managing the technology team, Shivani is currently leading the product’s research. One key challenge and objective with Shared Reality is creating a new category of product that addresses the longstanding challenge of technical data consistency. The heart of Samp’s mission is to help industrial sites adapt to the growing necessities of sustainability and safety, overcome challenges such as staff shortages, and achieve operational excellence.
Samp is now deployed in over hundreds of industrial sites across Europe and its clients include leading industry players from sectors such as energy and utilities. What’s more, in September last year Samp raised a further €6 million investment. This injection of capital is enabling the company to scale and deploy its innovative Shared Reality solution internationally. The team’s overall goal is to reach 5,000 industrial sites by 2030.
