Entrepreneur Profile: An Interview with Walter Kissling of Navsat

Navsat

Entrepreneur Profile: An Interview with Walter Kissling of Navsat.- 13/07/2010

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Walter Kissling, Founder and President of Navsat, a location-based services company in Costa Rica, spoke with the Latin America PE/VC Report about starting a technology business in Central America and the company’s future plans

LAVCA: Tell us a little about your background. Have you started other companies?

Kissling: I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and MBA from INCAE. I worked in finance for HSBC (formerly Banex) which was the largest financial private group in Costa Rica at the time. There I started and managed four different businesses for the group. One of them (third tier pension money management) was particularly successful and started a new industry in the country. It also allowed me to capitalize on my previous work and launch a separate career geared towards investment promotion and management. This led me to start Mesoamerica Fund with some partners. It was a Bain Capital type of private equity fund for the Central American region. I came out after the fund was fully invested and did some deals on my own with friends and family. As part of those deals we started one of the largest and most successful real estate development groups in Costa Rica. After a four year leave of absence out of the country I started Navsat on my return in 2006.

LAVCA: Please give us some background on NAVSAT and its products and technology.

Kissling: Navsat is a location based services (LBS) company. We developed and own the Costa Rican routable (GPS-enabled) map. We rent navigation solutions to the rental car industry (Costa Rica’s #1 industry is tourism). We are also an important player on the GPS fleet tracking space. More recently we introduced traffic information management in Costa Rica. Traffic information management allows you to see where the traffic jams are on your GPS unit in your car and route around them. There is some work being done in this area in México and Brazil, but apart from that, Costa Rica is the only country in Latin America where those services are offered.

LAVCA: How did you come up with the idea for NAVSAT?

Kissling: As mentioned, tourism is big in Costa Rica, yet addresses, roads and road signs are pretty bad. So getting around is somewhat of an adventure for a non-local. I saw the opportunity of developing a GPS routable map and renting it to the tourists through the rental car companies. In the process of doing that we realized we had entered a rapidly evolving and super dynamic industry and how the location component was being introduced in a variety of platforms and solutions and lots of opportunities came to life.

LAVCA: What sort of financing have you received thus far? From whom?

Kissling: At the beginning it was 100% self-funded with friends & family. After some 18 months we attracted capital from two big local media companies and a software developing company.