Workplace pains and strains can be serious and disabling for Ontario workers. Per year, the average critical workplace injury is around 62 people per 1000 workers, and most of these workplace injuries could be easily prevented. Benjamin Lee and partner Abdel El Bably have had 7 surgeries combined due to preventable workplace joint injuries. These experiences lead to the creation and innovation of Altius Analytics labs.
Altius Analytics Labs is a health-tech company, helping workplaces to better identify and prevent expensive, repetitive strain-joint injuries. As experts in ergonomics and computer vision engineering, Lee and El Bably developed a proprietary software tool that quickly, easily and more accurately helps users conduct industry-mandated ergonomic risk assessments.
Altius Analytics Labs has begun to experience major success due to many factors including hard work, research and mentorship but these founders are no strangers to the start-up world. Having learned to fail-fast, and pivot their ideas to address market opportunities – overcoming the hurdles along the way have only made their drive to succeed stronger.
When Lee and El Bably first launched Altius Analytics Labs, they weren’t sure where they’d be in 1, 2 or 3 years in the future, but they had a feeling that Altius Analytics Labs had the potential to be something big.
“I realized that if we were successful, this could blow up into something really big in terms of customers and revenue generation. That part is slowly being unveiled with our market traction,” says Lee. “I really didn’t know anything when it came to business development and customers – I had to learn all of that and Innovation Factory has been a huge help,” he adds.
In September 2019, Altius Analytics Labs was awarded second place at Innovation Factory’s Lion’s Lair Pitch Competition and took home over $56,000 in cash and in-kind prizes. Lee credits Lion’s Lair with perfecting his pitch and preparing him for his most recent investment from IDEaS, the Innovation for Defense Excellence and Security Program , where he was awarded $200,000 in funding for pilot testing.
“Lion’s Lair was a huge help in the sense that I’ve never had to pitch my business in the way I had to for Lion’s Lair; getting ready for that pitch was really eye-opening. I needed to get very deep into the business and learn the total landscape of everything we do. This allowed me to learn my business better than I ever had before and I have since been able take what I learned from Lion’s Lair and apply it to other pitch presentations and funding applications,” says Lee.
Thanks to the recent funding from IDEaS, and the mentorship and programming offered by Innovation Factory, Lee expects to see Altius Analytics Labs continue to grow. Another signal of this growth includes their acceptance as a finalist in Innovation Factory’s Synapse Life Science Competition, with the pitch showcase taking place on March 27th, 2019.
To anyone looking to pursue a career path as an entrepreneur, Lee says that passion and customer research is everything. “Passion drives you to keep going when everything is falling to pieces around you. Get out there and start talking to potential customers ASAP. Customers drive everything. This is where we learned our biggest lesson – do your customer research!” advises Lee.
Altius Analytics is currently hiring a Computer Engineer with a focus on 3D pose estimation. Read more here.
To learn more about Altius Analytics Labs, visit: altiusanalyticslabs.com
