In the sprawling logistics yards and industrial ports that keep the global supply chain moving, wandering assets are everywhere.

Truck drivers will deposit their assets in the most convenient location and then proceed to the next job. The trailers at these huge, sprawling logistics centres can be hundreds of meters apart. But now, with the Indrus platform, not all wandering assets are lost. 

"These truck drivers might drop something off for somebody else. But they don't tell anyone where they've parked it," explains an Indrus co-founder, Ryan Liebregts, regarding the problem that sparked their company. "These yards are huge. They can hold thousands of assets. And so someone has to end up just walking up and down all the parking lanes until they find the one they're looking for, and that's quite time-consuming."

To solve this, the industry has traditionally turned to hardware: RFID tags, GPS transponders, and sensor networks. But Indrus, a Western Australia-based startup founded by two university friends, Ryan Liebregts and Dre Siwela, is building a solution that requires installing nothing at all.

Their platform calibrates existing security cameras to create a unified tracking grid. By stitching together feeds from cameras mounted on fences and poles, Indrus creates a live digital twin system that tracks assets across a facility without a single physical sensor touching the object.

The insight for Indrus came from a realisation that industrial facilities are already covered in eyes, they just aren't using them effectively.

"These large-scale organisations have security cameras that they have to have in place for compliance. And they don't really get used unless something goes wrong," the founder says. "So we want to add value on top of that by leveraging what they already have to be able to track every asset in real time."

The company’s roots trace back to Curtin University in Perth, where the founders, Ryan and Dre, met in a robotics unit. "This was like eight people in a room mucking around with these tiny little robots," recalls the co-founder. "And we happened to be grouped up into a team together, we really got on."

The concept solidified as Dre was working on an engineering thesis project on collision avoidance systems that used relatively expensive LIDAR. The team realised that rather than building complex new sensor arrays, they could achieve similar results "using just regular CCTV cameras."

While the startup operates in the computer vision space, they are careful to distinguish themselves from generic object detection. The challenge isn't identifying that a truck is a truck; it's understanding exactly where that truck is in 3D space as it moves between different camera angles.

The real IP lies in the spatial mapping. "Our secret sauce is in how we handle camera information", he continues. "How we fuse the cameras together. Creating one single system, rather than having fractured camera views, we combine them into one cohesive world."

This fusion allows the system to hand off the "ID" of an asset from one camera to another, creating a digital twin of the facility where managers can search for inventory as easily as Googling it.

The "Reddit" Moment 

Like many startups outside of Silicon Valley, Indrus had to find creative ways to gauge the market. Their entry into the U.S. market didn't come from a high-powered VC introduction, but from a post on a message board.

"I'm not gonna lie. It was a freak bit of luck," the founder laughs. "So when we were first starting out, we didn't really know if there were any competitors in the space... So we put off a post on Reddit, of all places... and the CTO of this company reached out to us and said, 'hey, guys, I've been looking for this exact solution for over a year. Let's get in touch.'"

That bit of luck validated a need that has since expanded beyond simple logistics. The company is now exploring safety applications, such as "tracking personnel if they go down or if they enter somewhere they shouldn't," with interest coming from the mining, oil and gas sectors.

For now, the team is focused on disciplined growth. "This technology can do so much, and we're only a very small team," the founder says. The goal is to focus on "the easiest customers to acquire and who's actually going to pay us.”