Talking with Edmundo Casas about such special topics as artificial intelligence, metaverse, programming, and entrepreneurship is like having tea in the living room of the house. Simple, straightforward and honest, this is this electronic civil engineer, MSc, PhD(c) in AI, creator of Casas Lab and founder of Kauel.
The first thing that impresses us is how his passion for technology was born. Something that may sound trivial to many, but for Edmundo it was what changed his view of the world.
“When I was little, I lived with my dad in my grandmother’s field. This was one of those big old country houses. A river ran by the side and there was a wheel at the bottom that turned with the current. I always looked at it and wondered why that wheel was there in the river. It was then that my grandmother told me that basically what that wheel did was to allow the generation of electricity and with that the bulbs were lit and that my grandfather gave energy to the house with that. But my grandfather was no longer there, he had died and what happened was that the bulbs did not light up, so every night we used candles,” Edmundo recalls with nostalgia in an interview with Entreprenerd.
“And it was like strange to hear that story of the famous wheel and on the other hand to see that there was no electricity, the bulbs did not light and you were with a candle at night. When I was 5 or 6 years old, at that time you went to school, nowadays children enter much earlier, and we went to San Pablo, which is a small town. And one of the things that surprised me is when we turned on the light… I flipped the switch and a light bulb went off in this town, so for me that was magic,” he recalls.
“Instead of having to light up at night in the field with a match or a candle, the light was turned on with a switch, and that was kind of magical. And that was like, where’s the wheel? Because deep down here you didn’t see that something was spinning and generating electrical energy, and then you realize that there are wires and those wires are connected to a wheel that’s somewhere, and that’s what generates the energy. And that motivated me a lot in terms of discovering,” explains Casas.
That’s how the spark was born, between his experience living in the countryside along with his reading of Ian Steward’s “The History of Mathematics”, this was the perfect mix for his “simple” vision of this subject. “I was always very good at math, I was the first student in my course for years and I think it has to do precisely because I saw things as very simple. That’s why I think that when you have a healthy life from the point of view of understanding things from nature, it’s much easier to understand the theory later.”
All this led him over the years to enter the Federico Santa María University of Valparaíso, the career of Electronic Civil Engineering. “I entered the electronics department to study in the class of ’98.”
Edmundo is convinced that the people you meet in life can also be an important part of your own path. “As a physics assistant at USM, he had to work in the physics department with professors such as the bishop and scientist, José Rodríguez, who was also director of the department and who in 2014 received the National Science Award,” he says.
He adds that, “When you interact with top-level scientists at a university like the Federico Santa María Technical University (USM), you forge through the level of demand, being able to mix everything that has to do with waves and mathematics, and understand how the world works. The truth is that this is very enriching.”
NEURAL NETWORKS TO A 3D HOLOGRAM
While immersing himself in the world of neural networks, when the topic of artificial intelligence was just science fiction topics made by Hollywood, Edmundo met his current partner in Kauel: Cristian Romero.
“Cristian and I worked on the development of software to solve Markov chain models of critical and continuous parameters to solve telecommunications systems,” he says.
It was in 2007 when, after working with Markov chains, they came up with the idea of making them in three dimensions. “Practically, this allowed us to visualize ourselves as if it were a molecule. And when you saw three dimensions, we came up with how we could see this in a three-dimensional space and created a hologram,” he explains.
He adds, “To represent these Markov chains in three dimensions, we went into the imaging method so that we could construct our dimension in the software and see it in 3D as a hologram. That’s how the hologram that we wanted at Kauel at that time was born. And with that hologram, Kauel was born.”
“And it’s nice because the hologram became very recognizable and they bought us and that’s how we created the first venture. So these holograms are now installed in museums to make representations, such as the MIM, the Museum of Addictions in Mexico and even in Las Vegas (…) But this came from this issue of the neural network and the Markov chain, that’s how the story was born,” says Edmundo.
FROM HOLOGRAMS TO VIDEO GAMES
And so it was that after giving life to holograms, these engineers went to the world of video games. “We went really hard, we made our own game engine. At that time there was no Unity, there was no Unreal, which are platforms that are used today to make video games or virtual reality, augmented reality, metaverses.”
“We build and create our own augmented reality systems, our own video game systems as a base. And at the time it was too much, too attractive and too exclusive. At that time we sold it at a high price and very few people had it,” he says.
“Then, we were presented with some challenges, which had to do with spotting faults and everything else. And that’s where we come to Artificial Vision, which Artificial Vision can also be solved with neural networks,” recalls Casas.
FROM SONY TO KAUEL
It was 2007, and after working at Sony, Edmundo wanted to follow an independent path and use all the background obtained in recent years to apply it in Kauel, his project with Cristián.
“In 2007 I made the decision to quit Sony to create Kauel. And this is interesting because when you’re in a company like Sony, it’s easy for people to welcome you, because you’re a Sony engineer. And when I made the decision to resign, it happened that I practically wrote like Edmundo Casa, and no one answered me. Then I was no longer the lord of Sony, but just anyone,” he confesses.
Casas says that it was a hard, difficult time, in which things did not go well, but that despite all the inconveniences and problems they faced, they never gave up. “It was very difficult for people to buy from you that you could make technology from Chile to the world, but I think it’s very important to never give up.”
FROM ANTONIO VARAS TO STANFORD
In order to finance the nascent Kauel , Edmundo began to teach at the Antonio Varas headquarters in Duoc, where together with Hernán Ramírez they developed a technical and technological center to support innovation and entrepreneurship, two concepts that were completely new at the time.
“Then we had some rooms in Antonio Vara’s Duoc, where Kauel had his songs installed. There we installed the first hologram, the images were floating above and people were looking at them at night. And that’s how we started with Cristán, developing Kauel.”
But it was the creation of a bracelet, the first of its kind in Chile, that brought them to retail by the hand of Falabella, however, this meant their first stumble.
“We made some video games that we launched in Falabella. They were the famous Kets. The Kets were Kauel’s pets. we were like the most massive Kinect (…) But at that time this was not very well understood, so we had 10,000 bracelets made that were connected to your computer, they brought Kauel’s video games and the computer camera recognized the movements of the body (…) but no one bought them, because no one understood the concept of artificial vision, of recognizing the movement of the body, Because I’m talking about that from the year 2010. We were out of time.”
After this and thanks to his connection with Oscar Solari, he manages to go to the US to learn what Qualcomm does, and then stay studying in California, and later go on to Stanford University.
“At Stanford, my vision of the perspective of the world, business development, how to build a business model, that the technical is not the predominant, but how you use the technique to contribute to people’s lives and therefore, transfer that and transform it into a business. And literally, that in me generates a change. So, in such a way that when I return to Chile, Kauel changes completely. That was back in 2016.”Holds.
THE NEW KAUEL 2016
After completely disassociating himself from Duoc, Casas began to develop 100% Kauel under the business models, in an intelligent way of how to monetize it, “that’s where Kauel begins to grow”.
“Kauel had very powerful things, but he didn’t sell that much. And since 2016 that has begun to change with this other look, let’s say, of looking at the world from another perspective. And in 2018, Kauel raised a first round of investment, precisely because the business models were attractive, they had nothing to do with the previous Kauel,” says Casas.
“And after that, we get into the industrial world. And that’s where we come to the world of energy, of oil, with artificial vision systems. And it also has to do with a market focus,” he explains.
It is thanks to this change of vision, that today Kauel is a very attractive company in terms of sales execution and real growth.
In the words of its co-founder, for 2024, “what is coming is a very strong growth in sales. I have no doubt that Kauel is going to be the largest technology company in Chile and, why not, in the world in the coming years.”
Check out the full interview in our video.
