New on the Log: a series about the entrepreneurs currently building at Beam. None of them arrived with their own idea. That’s not incidental, it’s the model. First up, someone building a business around a machine most people have never heard of, and definitely never wondered what it’s worth.
The Founder Trying to Prove Herself Wrong
Picture this: a wooden cabin on an island in the Finnish archipelago, no neighbors for miles, water on every side. Katriina Viita is finishing her coffee before our call starts. It’s a lot of quiet for someone who spends her working days thinking about stretch hoods and palletizers, the unglamorous machines that wrap and stack pallets at the end of a packaging line. But that’s Beam’s Entrepreneurs in Residence for you. The setting is calm. The problem rarely is.
Katriina didn’t come up with this idea. Nobody at Beam does.
That’s true of every founder here: the problems all come from inside BEUMER Group, a Hidden Champion that quietly leads the world in intralogistics, real friction that industrial operators are already living with, not something sketched out on a whiteboard. Katriina’s problem is one BEUMER had already seen firsthand, inside its own customer base: aging equipment nobody was quite sure whether to repair or scrap.
That’s the moment Techtally started.
What do you do with an old palletizer, anyway?
Katriina spent seven years in the rental equipment business before Beam, so she already knew the texture of the problem even if she didn’t know its name yet. Industrial operators sit on old, expensive machinery: palletizers, stretch hoods, the standardized end-of-line packaging equipment that every logistics operation eventually accumulates. Funny enough, stretch hood machines and palletizers are literally part of BEUMER’s own product lineup. Katriina isn’t working near BEUMER’s world, she’s working on the exact category of machine it builds, just further down the line, once the machine is old and nobody’s quite sure what to do with it. At some point, every one of those machines faces the same question. Is it worth repairing? Or is it scrap?
Right now, most operators guess. Techtally is a valuation tool that answers the question properly: what would it actually cost to bring a given machine back from obsolescence, versus what it’s worth as scrap metal, versus what it could still fetch if it were pointed at the right marketplace. Katriina isn’t building a marketplace herself. There are already several, with decent APIs. She’s building the thing that tells you which door to walk through, and with what number in your hand.
Not exactly a headline-grabbing pitch. Which is sort of the point. Nobody wakes up dreaming about the resale value of pallet-wrapping machinery. But somebody has to put a number on it, and right now, mostly, nobody does.
Falsify first, build second
Ask Robert Bach, Beam’s CEO, what the actual job is in these early months, and he’ll put it bluntly: prove that the problem doesn’t exist. Not validate it and hope. Try, honestly and rigorously, to kill it. If it’s still standing after that, you’ve earned the right to build something. This is how Katriina puts it:
“We’re basically trying to falsify the problem and if we can’t, that’s when we know it’s real.”
In practice, that meant two months of unglamorous groundwork before she built anything at all: ten or eleven interviews through Beam’s own network, plus six more through Guidepoint, a paid research platform that gave her direct access to operators she’d never have reached through her own contacts alone.
What’s live right now is the real beginning of Techtally: techtally.eu, already gathering interest and feedback from operators living this problem today. It’s early-stage, and it’s real, both at the same time.
Why start a company at all
Katriina is candid about why she wanted this instead of a normal job: she’s the kind of person who doesn’t fit neatly into one, multi-talented, curious about too many things at once, happier defining how she works and who she works with than slotting into someone else’s org chart. A year before Beam, she tried building something alone. It didn’t survive contact with real life: no structure, a co-founder situation that didn’t hold together, and eventually, not enough energy left to keep going. Beam, for her, was the version of founding a company that came with scaffolding already attached.
There’s just one piece of that scaffolding still missing.
Katriina is looking for a technical Co-founder
Katriina is building Techtally alone right now, and she’d rather not be. She’s said so plainly, to Beam and to anyone who’ll listen: the right person for this just hasn’t turned up yet.
Specifically, she’s looking for a German-speaking technical co-founder to own the data product side, the calculation engine underneath the valuation tool, while she keeps driving the industry relationships and the business side.
If that sounds like you, or like someone you know, Techtally is real, already underway, and live right now. Reach out to Katriina directly, or get in touch with the Beam team, we’re always happy to make the introduction.