More than ten years of getting machines talking.
It all starts with a question: how do you connect what isn’t connected? We first put it to websites and mobile apps. Then to turbines.
Mobapi is an industrial monitoring platform, not tied to any manufacturer. It brings equipment of every make and every generation, legacy equipment and remote sites included, onto one screen, together with the teams’ round readings.
At first, phones.
Mobapi is a spin-off of Bitwip, a communications consultancy. Vincent Reboul, a telecommunications engineer, founded it in Cayenne. The agency was building its first mobile apps, and web back offices to keep them up to date. Between the two, a link was missing: an API. That is where the name comes from, “mobile” and “API”. The first version of Mobapi was a demonstrator: it updated a mobile app from a web back office. We presented it in Barcelona, at Mobile World Congress.
Then the project matured. Mobapi became an API platform in its own right. It created a read-only API on a PostgreSQL database, an Excel file or a CSV. It plugged into the APIs then available on the market. It processed Sigfox feeds. A visual editor put it all together by drag and drop.
Then the machines.
Connected objects came into the platform: the fill level of collection bins, the energy of buildings. Our first monitoring projects for industrial sites relied on it.
With industry, the project took on a new scale. Industrial companies have networks that must stay isolated from the internet. No online service gets in. We had to go to the machine: we built a unit that sits next to it. It reads the machine’s data on site and sends it. Today it is the Mobapi.BOX. With it, we equipped a power plant.
At this plant operator, the oldest machine had no network port and no network expansion card. It sent its status to a dot-matrix printer. We connected the BOX to that output and read what it printed, without changing anything in the control system.
French Guiana calls for systems that hold up: sites there are isolated, and the network can’t be taken for granted. So we built a system that is resilient by design. One day, a submarine cable broke. The BOX units kept their measurements, then sent them once the link was back. That is what makes Mobapi suited to isolated sites and to mixed fleets, legacy equipment included.
Three generations of control systems ended up on the same screen, along with tanks whose probes could only be read on site. Alarms came at clients’ request. Rounds and the shift log followed.
The product then narrowed down to what teams look at: their data, on screen. The API generator itself stayed in-house. We use it to put each project together faster.
Where we are now.
R&D has not stopped since 2016. We pitched this work in Houston, to oil & gas industry players. The question we started with has not changed. From this story, we keep four rules.
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We start from your fleet.
You send the equipment’s model number and a photo of its nameplate. We’ll tell you what Mobapi can get out of it, and how.
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We write the missing connector.
If it doesn’t exist, we build it. Mobapi is not tied to any manufacturer.
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We read, we don’t control.
The BOX sends no commands to your equipment. Your teams stay in charge.
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We plan for the outage.
If the link drops, the BOX keeps its measurements, then sends them once the network is back.
Your fleet, as it stands. Show it to us.
Makes, models, age, network on site: we prepare the demo from the equipment you list.