What was the mission that led you to create FuelTech?
Twenty years ago, South America had a closed electronics market that was limiting imports to protect the domestic industry. As it was expected, this approach backfired and put us decades behind other countries, especially in the motorsports sector. As I was a fiery car enthusiast that was completing his degree in electrical engineering, I got inspired to build a basic ECU, which would later prove to become a unique business idea. FuelTech started out in my apartment and little by little conquered the drag racing world. With the engine being controlled by so many electronics (transmission control, traction control, power management, dashboard information, electric motors), the ECU turned into a vehicle control unit. OEMs need to comply with emissions and fuel economy regulations, while in motorsports, performance and technological advantages are by far more important. Consequently, we have been able to develop a unique ECU that helped us differentiate on the market. Furthermore, we are one of the few privately owned companies in this industry as we are not relying on external investment but we are guided by our passion towards making a difference. Most of our manufacturing and R&D is in Brazil, where we have a team of 170 employees, but we are also present in the U.S. with a workforce of 35 people.
Attracting talent is a pain point in many industries nowadays; how does recruiting a workforce from Brazil help you overcome this challenge?
Brazil has a generous talent pool which, in other parts of the world, could only be acquired at prohibitive costs. The South of the country has an especially high concentration of engineers thanks to all the colleges and universities that are amassed there. In a business like ours, it is highly important to work with creative minds that are able to solve problems as fast as possible, and besides India or Israel, Brazil is the main provider of such indispensable talent. In addition to these, the wage gap encourages young people to specialize in technical domains that can open their way to high paying jobs. However, attracting the right talent boils down to showcasing the higher purpose of the company because commercial success is ultimately powered by passionate work.
The automotive industry is dramatically changing. How difficult is it to keep up with all the innovations that are being deployed in this space?
Since motorsports is a niche industry, we do not have the same investment power (like the cellphone industry, for example) to push the development of new chips or better user interfaces. Usually, all the players in this space embrace technology trends much later and, as such, we need to be imaginative enough to compensate for this weakness.
If we were to slow down our R&D and develop a platform in ten years, we would quickly become obsolete because electronics technology changes every year. However, being a fairly small company allows us to be quick on our feet and incorporate innovations (e.g., AI, video and audio processing) much faster than OEMs.
Given your unique experience, what advice would you give to a young entrepreneur that would like to start a company?
First and foremost, finding a goal to fight for and carving your own path should be a good start since copying other companies' business models is a sure way to kill innovation. Back in 2008, when we first presented our product in the U.S., the public was reticent about replacing their classic box-under-the-dashboard type of ECU with a screen-based one that allowed drivers to make changes on the fly. Because we were so confident in the value that our product could bring into the motorsports world, we persevered and, today, we passed the threshold of 100,000 sold ECUs. It is true that it took us ten years to make sure our concept is feasible, but with hard work, come great rewards.
What are the key objectives that you would like Fueltech to achieve in the coming years?
A few months ago, we announced our newest platform (Vision FT) which will incorporate state of the art technologies, so the plan going forward is to commercialize it to as many motorsports players as possible. Our mission is to bring a different layer of control and safety in the context of the imminent electrification of this industry. We plan to do a massive software update to all the ECUs that we have deployed up to this point because our ultimate goal is to push the adoption of technology in the motorsports space at an unprecedented pace.
