Based in Leeds, Hark was founded in 2016 with a vision for initially helping companies in pharmaceutical industries become more efficient and reduce waste.

Hark connects to physical assets to create digital twins, using a software platform that streamlines operational processes on a global scale. It recently held a hackathon in Leeds which concluded in the winner getting work experience with the company.

We spoke to Jordan Appleson, CEO at Hark, to find out more.

What is Hark’s mission?

Jordan Appleson:  Our mission is to empower people by designing secure products that effortlessly connect to the physical, adding intelligence to bridge the gap between action and understanding. Hark’s cloud-based platform has been built to help companies simplify the route to intelligent assets to increase efficiency while reducing waste

It’s a cloud-based monitoring system which works alongside existing infrastructure to monitor, store, and analyse business-critical sensor data from physical assets with easy-to-use cloud software, from anywhere in the world.

Our tech provides real-time digital twins of physical assets. From process values in assembly lines to energy usage across hundreds of supermarket stores, we allow our clients to monitor sensor data, analyse trends, set up alerts and most importantly evaluate performance. Accessible data and actionable information are key to increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs.

What industries do you operate in?

Initially, our platform was solely focused on offering help to pharmaceutical industries to monitor and record environmental data. Recently, it has expanded to provide solutions to numerous other industries.

For facilities management companies and retailers, our platform provides exciting new tools. By using machine learning, the platform is capable of detecting faults within systems before they happen, potentially saving clients valuable time and expenditure.

There are now energy monitoring capabilities built in the platform that allows users to analyse power usage and understand where energy is used the most, helping to reduce their carbon footprint and avoid costly bills.

What makes you better than the competition?

Our legacy integration really makes us stand out – we’re getting data out of systems that are decades old.  We’ve gone to great lengths to make Hark hardware effortlessly agile, so it can be retrofitted to any existing monitoring system.

This is a huge selling point to our customers and partners, as what we offer doesn’t make their full operation redundant and they won’t incur large costs when it comes to the installation of our hardware.

What’s it like being a tech company in your city/region?

The North is an exciting place to have founded the business. Leeds is already an established hub for marketing technology businesses and there’s much more on the horizon – from investment groups, education facilities and enterprise relocating to Leeds. Yorkshire has an industrial heritage and we’re excited to play our part in linking technology and industry.

What’s your investment journey to date?

We’ve had in the region of £100k in seed investment early on in our journey but we’re now self-sufficient, investing profits into the next stage of our growth, in line with Hark’s long term vision.

What’s on the horizon for Hark?

Hark has recently secured one of the big four supermarkets as a client for a 600-store roll-out of our technology. We’re currently monitoring and helping a variety of use cases: managing energy usage retail and logistics, controlling lighting and looking at solar panels. We have our sights set on enterprise customers in the short term and then plan to bring IoT and the value of our platform into more SMEs.

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