We tell our university students to think big, to think unconventionally. To think outside the box. At Alltrons, there IS no box. There never was. And the business plan is to consider that unconventional methods sometimes work. At the High Tech Plaza, Alltrons founder Kayle Knops, 26, isn’t just rewriting the script on technology development. He’s rewriting the script on how his company works … what they do and how they do it. Something that doesn’t work for Alltrons might work for someone else. Alltrons “doesn’t have a focus, but it does have a focus on not having a focus,” Kayle said.

At this point, Alltrons has three areas of focus:
• It’s an engineering consultancy.
• As an R&D firm, they dream up their own products as well as help clients develop their MVPs.
• They make products for clients and themselves as a rapid prototyping shop.

These multiple business lines don’t necessarily have to generate revenue at the same time, and everyone is expected to have multiple talents so they assist when and where needed. Kayle defines success as two of the three paths are generating sufficient revenue that it doesn’t matter if the third is that active. “Usually we have multiple products that we want to bring to the market in the pipeline,” Kayle said. “If we don’t have a client for either R&D or prototyping, we use those resources for our own products. Since we only sell our own products after completion, we can always prioritize new projects from clients.”

So, he’s doing it all wrong. Yet he’s doing it all right.

At eight years in, Alltrons has 12 employees from six countries, including Albania, Romania and Lithuania and even the United States. That’s because it started out at Technical University of Eindhoven and is a collective of talented engineering students, designers and digital developers. (Alltrons still has offices at TU/e, where most of the students work.)

While Kayle doesn’t care about your nationality, he does care that you have multiple skills. It may be fake it till you make it, “but we are confident that in all cases, someone has the skill on the team to execute.” The staff of 12 includes seven software people, two mechanical engineers, two data engineers and one industrial designer.

And these projects go way beyond building clients a nice website.

The project Kayle & Co. are currently focused on (among many others) is a camera. Simple, right? Nope. This camera isn’t designed to capture conventional images of people or things. Developed for a confidential partner with a very specific need, it captures the data about what’s in the frame. 

Dubbed the DcV3, it can be used for Smart Cities and monitors everything from crowd control to how people move through cities. Unlike similar cameras, it doesn’t require an ethernet cable, only a SIM card for the download. “The nice thing about this camera is that it transfers almost no data. The camera processes all images in simple metrics before uploading.”

“I'm working on the process and pre-processing,” said Veja Katiliute, a 20-year-old data scientist from Lithuania who also focuses on software. “My job is taking the image that was 360 degrees and making it flat on the screen, yet undistorted.”

“Her mathematical model is basically fixing that. So, that looks normal,” Kayle said. Well, normal in the sense that it’s a data representation of what’s in the frame. The device requires multiple skills to create the algorithm that processes the data to the mechanical controls, to the software and then a developer to do the UX for a dashboard that makes sense to non-techies.

“We developed the whole chain,” Kayle noted.

Alltrons is developing the camera because Kayle needed a product that will generate revenue to fund more R&D. If they sell 200 cameras, they make a profit. To that end, five or six people are dedicated to the project at any given time. “In order to get money to make stuff, you have to sell stuff. And then you take the money from selling stuff and you make more stuff,” he says. “So, when you’re not selling anything, you have time, but you don’t have money.”

At the heart of Alltrons is a precocious engineer who’s also studying for his electrical engineering and software development degree at the same time he’s building this business. When he founded Alltrons in 2014, Kayle was 18, the minimum age to register a company without co-signers in the Netherlands. He started by creating a web shop to sell electronics using Magento software. Then others started asking him for help developing plugins for other Magento web shops. That cash helped him bootstrap Alltrons and segue into making hardware and software. One of his early products was a pressure-sensitive computer keyboard that measured how fast or hard the keys are pressed, great data for the gaming industry.

Now, most of Alltrons’ customers need low-volume, expensive specialized equipment, but revenue is high. As for his management philosophy, Alltrons is all about flexibility and getting team experience on the job while balancing staff and client projects. Every project doesn’t require all the mechanic engineers, so some do other tasks or work for clients or work on their own projects, cutting the burn rate and making the use of labor more efficient.

“We often hear things like ‘You shouldn't do it that way,’” Kayle says. “In some sense I understand the importance of focus, but so far, it's working for us.”