The 60 employees take up an entire floor in Northwest in Copenhagen, and with a fresh Series A investment of 170 million, Eupry is now set to take the US by storm with its solution: a system that monitors temperature and humidity in the most regulated industries.
The Danish Tech Challenge- alumni is on its way to becoming a major success story in Danish entrepreneurship. But the impressive growth was far from a given when the technical founders got together in 2014. Adam Hartmann-Kruckow, one of the co-founders – and today Chief Commercial Officer at Eupry – explains.
“My driving force is to create, and I joined forces with a team of founders who feel the same way. We are a strong founding team, but we only consist of techies. And it took a few years before reality hit us.”
For the first three years of the company’s existence, the team soft-funded development and generated some income by doing consulting gigs on the side. The invention, their core business, was technically advanced. But it didn’t make a cent. That didn’t change until 2017, when they decided to stop consulting and focus on commercialising Eupry.
“I made an agreement with myself that now I can’t think about the product and what can be developed. I only have to think about how to get what we have off the ramp. I only have to think about sales and commercialisation. So we borrowed cars from our parents and started driving to general practitioners and asking if they would buy our system,” recalls Hartmann-Kruckow, who in hindsight can see that it was only with the advent of commercialisation that the product took shape.
The idea for Eupry has always been the same: Precise and compliant temperature monitoring. However, the solution has changed shape many times in the face of the market.
Sales drive product development
Sales started when two of the founders began travelling around the country as salespeople, but not in an explosive way at first. However, in the meetings with doctors, they realised that new requirements were coming for pharmacies – another potential customer group.
“In the beginning it was the doctors, then it was the pharmacies, and I think we visited every pharmacy in Denmark three times to sell to them,” says Hartmann-Kruckow.
When they reached 30 per cent of pharmacies in Denmark as their customers, they were ready for the next step: To start selling to laboratories. Then they started knocking on the doors of the big pharmaceutical companies. And although the path has been a bit backward through the value chain, Hartmann-Krukow believes the sales task has been crucial to where the product is today.
“In reality, it’s the skilled salespeople who own product roadmapping. Because if they sell a solution that we don’t have today, they own the roadmap tomorrow. Follow the money,” he says and continues:
“You only get that honest feedback when you have a customer who has to pay for your product. We’ve experienced that many times – and we still do it today; it’s what drives changes and new features.”
Salesman with an engineering mindset
Adam Hartmann-Kruckow initially became a salesperson out of necessity. Today, he has found a passion for sales and has even discovered that his engineering skills can be put to good use in sales and marketing.
“I started by putting DKK5,000 into online marketing. Then DKK10,000. And now we spend almost a million a month. It has made a big difference for us to think of it as building a sales factory, where I can use many of my engineering skills. I’m really fascinated by how excited I am to lead this sales organisation across Denmark and the US, where we are scaling now: Sales must be formulaic and driven by playbooks,” says Hartmann-Kruckow.
However, that doesn’t mean he thinks all product developers should borrow a car to force themselves to become good salespeople. Quite the opposite.
“It’s a bit contradictory. I’m proud that I’ve succeeded in running the commercial part of Eupry, but we’ve also spent too much time on that part. Cynically, we should have had a different composition of founders so that we were much more commercial from the start. It would probably have saved us a few years,” he says.
Even though Eupry’s product is advanced, they didn’t need to spend years developing before they started selling. He believes that a drawing, a dream and an idea of how long it would take to create would have been enough.
Therefore, he strongly encourages technical founded startups to find commercial competences for the company much earlier. After meeting the latest cohort from Danish Tech Challenge for a presentation, he realised that many teams only have technicians – just like Eupry had 10 years ago. And this means that a lot of good ideas never get a chance to succeed commercially, he believes.
“DTU is a marketplace for cool and quirky ideas that can be commercialised. But maybe all these cool products don’t succeed because they lack a death drive to sell something? Sales is a grind mode with a lot of battle analogies – that’s just the way it is. But, I’m so excited about how many great companies I can build today, knowing that I can combine DTU’s strong product competencies with sales that scale.”
Fact: Eupry’s journey towards sales:
2012: Adam Hartmann-Kruckow writes his bachelor thesis on the distribution of medicines in collaboration with Unicef. This becomes the starting point for Eupry, which was formally established in 2014.
2014: Eupry becomes a part of the hardware accelerator, Danish Tech Challenge run by DTU Science Park.
2015: 18 months after founding, the team realises that Unicef is not a potential customer for the solution: the global organisation cannot do business with small startups from DTU. However, the founders realise that there is similar regulation elsewhere in the market, so Eupry continues development with soft funding and consulting work on the side.
2017: If the founders are to work full-time with Eupry, they need to generate revenue. So, Adam Hartmann-Kruckow and his co-founder start travelling the country to sell the solution to GPs and Pharmacies.
2018: Sales to doctors lead Eupry on the trail of new requirements for pharmacies that they can solve with their system. This relatively quickly leads to a 30 per cent market share in Denmark.
2020: Eupry starts to have a real playbook and grows the sales organisation. This leads to sales of to laboratories and pharmaceutical companies – both in Denmark and abroad.
2025: 30% of revenue comes from the US, and with DKK170 million in investor capital, Eupry is set to make a real impact in the US. Adam Hartmann-Kruckow just moved to the US with his wife, two kids, two guitars and three full boxes of teddy bears to get the team in place. A sales team that is planned to grow to 50 people over the next 3 years.
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