Founders Everywhere: Eren Aksu
Eren Aksu is the co-founder and CEO of ThreeV, a Multi-Sensory Asset Intelligence Platform company founded with the mission of saving lives using AI and Computer Vision.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Industries that rely on complex infrastructure, such as power and utilities, often struggle with efficiently assessing and maintaining physical assets such as transmission towers, distribution poles or substations. The traditional methods for inspecting these assets is manual, time-consuming, and prone to error, leading to high costs, safety risks, and inconsistent decision-making. ThreeV’s Multi-Sensory Asset Intelligence Platform (MS-AIP) integrates visual field data, existing asset related data, computer vision, and generative AI to provide a more operationally efficient, standardized, and data-driven approach to asset inspections and management. This helps companies make faster, safer, and more informed decisions to prevent potential disasters like wildfires, while reducing Operations & Maintenance costs. Although fully focused on electric utilities initially, ThreeV has future plans to expand into adjacent areas like vegetation management, oil, gas, and public infrastructure inspections.
Co-founder and CEO Eren Aksu, originally from Turkey and a dual citizen, has spent over a decade in technology and consulting, specializing in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and computer vision (CV). He met both his co-founders during their time working together at Deloitte. Donald Brady, COO, is Eren’s former boss and brings extensive experience from Apple and Deloitte Digital. Umang Sharma, CTO, was a lead data scientist and an expert in machine learning, having authored a book on deep learning. They’re a team that combines startup agility, consulting expertise, and utility industry knowledge.
What’s the motivation behind ThreeV?
While working as a technology consultant, I helped some of the world’s largest organizations integrate frontier technologies like Augmented Reality and computer vision into their workflows. My co-founders and I noticed a widespread disconnect between field operations and decision-making around infrastructure and physical assets—a cross industry problem. Instead of building custom models and solutions for each client, we saw an opportunity to pre-build common AI models in a dedicated platform to reduce costs, improve time to value, and increase safety for organizations of all sizes at scale, instead of just the biggest ones that could afford it.
What started as a strong business idea quickly turned into something much more personal for me. After the devastating earthquake in Turkey that claimed over 60,000 lives, I couldn’t stop thinking about how many of those lives might have been saved and how much damage could have been prevented with better infrastructure insights.
What’s ThreeV’s mission?
Threev’s mission is to use computer vision to help save lives by identifying risks in physical infrastructure before disasters strike while also helping asset intensive companies perform their critical tasks more efficiently using automation. We apply our technology across industries like electric utilities, gas utilities and Oil & Gas to make communities safer and more resilient.
How does ThreeV inspire “customer love”?
We work primarily with electric utilities, helping them conduct safer and faster system inspections. Customers appreciate our flexible, modular platform that adapts to their needs, and our innovative technology, which they say stands out from anything they've seen before. They are even beginning to talk about it to other utilities and businesses, which is a good sign—especially in this traditional industry, where word of mouth and trust are so important.
Tell us about some milestones that ThreeV has crushed.
Last year we secured one of the largest utility companies in the United States as an anchor customer and secured over $1M in revenues in our first year in business in a legacy industry. If we can solve problems for these complex large utilities, we can scale to medium and smaller ones too. We also built out a very strong technical team with folks across consulting, tech startup, and utility backgrounds, which was a significant achievement.
Why the name ThreeV?
Initially, ThreeV was a play on words with "3D and Computer Vision" since we used 3D models for computer vision training with synthetic data. Over time, it evolved to represent our core value drivers for the business: Verify (verifying real world findings using computer vision), Venture (exploring data using generative AI), and Vocalize (our customers sharing data and insights among internal and external teams).
How has your background influenced you as a founder?
I've always followed my deep curiosity for frontier tech, coupled with my interest and passion for social impact, history, and helping people. This combination has always led me to very interesting, unique experiences and places around the world, and lately that's become ThreeV which I feel very fortunate to have been able to create with my co-founders.
Interesting fact:
I left my apartment in Malibu to start ThreeV in the beginning of 2024, and a year later, that apartment along with the entire community surrounding it was destroyed in a wildfire — a powerful reminder of why I started this company.
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