Two friends who had met in junior high school ended up in the same lecture halls at Institut Teknologi Bandung, both studying industrial engineering. That small coincidence is where Nodeflux starts.
Meidy Fitranto and Faris Rahman reconnected at ITB, bound by a shared love of IT. In 2016 they started a company, and its first idea was not the one that made it known. Nodeflux began as a big-data analytics platform.
Rahman, the CTO, later admitted that building the first systems took heavy automation and repeated modification, and that it was difficult at first.
By late 2016 they had noticed something. Demand for computer vision was high and almost no Indonesian company was doing it. They pivoted, and the company became a vision AI business.
The early work was unglamorous. Rahman, the CTO, later admitted that building the first systems took heavy automation and repeated modification, and that it was difficult at first. Fitranto pointed to the larger problem: top AI engineers in Indonesia are mostly from abroad or educated overseas, which he partly blamed on university curricula.
Still, customers came. Police departments were early users. The platform, VisionAIre, read license plates, spotted illegal parking and counted vehicles from camera feeds, and Jakarta's government used it. In 2017 Qlue, a rival of sorts, put in seed money and became a shareholder, along with Adskom and Prasetia Dwidharma. East Ventures followed in 2018. Big events built credibility: the 2018 Asian Games and the IMF-World Bank annual meeting.
By the time KrASIA interviewed them, Nodeflux connected to more than 3,000 cameras, ranked in the top 25 of the NIST face recognition test out of about 90 vendors, and was the only Indonesian company in NVIDIA's Metropolis partner program. Fitranto said the team was not rushing to close a round because cash flow was positive.
The founder lesson is about timing and friendship. Two people who already trusted each other found a gap that nobody local was filling, and moved into it within months.