Deep Tech Talk: An Interview with Staex GmbH

Congratulations to the Deep Tech Star 2024 in the category “Web3 – DLT, Blockchain, NFT & Metaverse”: Staex GmbH! As one of 15 finalists, the company received the Deep Tech Award on 11 July 2024.

Staex offers a service package for IoT devices that cannot use a VPN, ensuring that communication is protected from hackers by encrypting outdated protocols. In addition, its multi-hop architecture makes it easier to build complex networks, which improves network performance, reliability and scalability. Read more in our interview now!

Congratulations you are one of the finalists of the 9th Deep Tech Award! What does the Deep Tech Award mean to you and what was the motivation behind your application?
Thank you! We’re very excited. It is an honor to be recognized by Berlin’s community and also an opportunity for us to present our vision to a broader audience. DTA also means for us the recognition of our work and a proof for a broader acceptance in the industry.

Berlin is said to be one of the few German hubs for technological innovation. How do you experience the local tech infrastructure and how is it influenced by the Deep Tech Award?
The local tech community and the infrastructure is awesome! We found some of our clients thanks to The Drivery — a co-working space and mobility hub from where we work most of the time. Deep Tech Award brings people from different industries together, and this is essential for the health of the whole ecosystem.

Let’s shift the perspective and talk about you a little more. You applied with your IoT-focused network solution. Please give us a little glimpse into your founding story and your key motivation to build this product.
Staex has started as a management buy-out from Deutsche Telekom — our mothership company — and now is an independent business backed by major investors. Our goal is to securely expose all IoT devices to the Internet. This is the single most important step to enable machine-to-machine economy, which is the future of the
Internet.

Why do you think your Staex made the finalists list and why is it Deep Tech?
Marrying IoT devices and Web3 technologies is something that only tech guys can do, isn’t it? We believe we made it to the finals thanks to the community. Their support means a lot to us.

What is the key technological innovation within your IoT-focused network solution and why does it advance the state of the art?
We bring IoT devices to the Internet. Why is this innovative? IoT devices are the main sources of data, and the data is the «bread and butter» of machine-to-machine economy and the future Internet. Such an economy can’t properly function on top of isolated and siloed IoT networks that feed their data to cloud services. Only decentralized
IoT networks fit into the machine-to-machine economy whereas centralized ones only benefit their creators and not the community and the economy at large.

What was the biggest obstacle in your developing process? How did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge for us was to bring Web2 companies to the Web3 world. We tackled this problem from multiple angles. First we partnered with several blockchains to integrate their technologies into our IoT network. Then we partnered with multiple web2 companies to showcase the value that Web3 brings to the table. It took us a considerable amount of time to get from frustrating “I don’t need Web3” to exciting “When is the next project? We can’t wait!”.

How do you ensure a seamless and engaging user experience within your IoT-focused network solution, especially considering the complexity of Web3.0 technologies?
We hide most of the complexity through minimalistic configuration and helpful error messages. Most of the time the system itself can say what is wrong and how to fix it. Recently we developed a web UI to further simplify network management for our clients.

What measures have you implemented to ensure the security and trustworthiness of your validation solution?
Staex is all about security. In our newest release we block all the network traffic by default, and then you have to selectively allow the communication between certain services through tunnels. Services can belong to different parties. Each tunnel can be enabled and disabled individually. This is in contrast to some other VPNs that allow any traffic within the private network by default, and allow disabling only the whole nodes, not the tunnels.

How do you navigate the regulatory landscape and address ethical considerations associated with Web3.0 technologies?
We closely work with our partners to make it possible to carry out machine-to-machine payments using Web2 tools and to subsequently integrate them with Web3. Web3-related regulations are something that we need to address in the future. If “ethical” means privacy, we store only public keys in the blockchain and on our servers; the private keys belong only to our clients.

What future trends do you foresee in the Web3.0 space, and how is Staex positioned to adapt to or drive these trends?
More and more Web3 companies recognize the importance of real-world use cases. Staex is uniquely positioned as a bridge between Web2 and Web3, and we develop such use cases with our partners.

What do you wish for in our technological or digital future?
I want my robocat to buy and deliver groceries to my home.

What advice would you like to pass to young entrepreneurs and tech innovators who want to reach their goals and maybe also want to take part in the Deep Tech Award 2025? Since out of 100 applicants you made it into the finalists, we figure you have some real pro-tips here.
Follow your dreams!

Thank you so much for all your fascinating insights!