As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 26th of November, 2019, a few years ago, former Osijek student Srđan Kovačević returned to his hometown of Osijek in Eastern Croatia, which initially left to go and study mechanical engineering in Zagreb.
“After graduating from university, I completed my master’s degree in financial mathematics at the University of Oxford, then I worked for ten years in Zagreb in the financial sector,” says Kovačević, and as was reported by SiB RTL. The ex Osijek student passes over his career quickly, preferring instead to discuss the time when he, along with his partners, Vlatko Matijević and Ivan Jelušić, founded Orqu, a successful Slavonian startup that designed and produced user-friendly glasses for the world to be able to look through the perspective of the drone it controls.
However, back in 2016, when this former Osijek student initially returned back home to his Eastern Croatian city, he wasn’t really thinking all that much about drones.
“I returned to Osijek during a transition period between youth and adulthood. My wife was pregnant and we’re both from Osijek. This city has many benefits for the life of a young family. Besides, I didn’t have a job at that moment, and my financial situation was such that I could afford one year of sort of playing around, a year in which I could about think what I wanted to do,” he says.
They started out in a small office with just three Ikea desks in it. Very quickly, there were more than twenty of them.
”We doubled our revenue every year. This may not be too much of a problem when you’re so small, but it was clear that the model we chose was the right one. For a couple of years, everyone in the former Yugoslavia doing hardware work was either our client, or we were in some way cooperating with them, or at least at some point in contact,” this innovative former Osijek student told SiB RTL.
“We were hobbyists when it came to drones, and so, through that hobby and as a kind of pet project of ours, we started developing first person view glasses. These are basically VR glasses that allow the person operating the drone to view the world from the drone’s perspective, to see what the drone sees,” he recounts.
Not long after, this project proved to be quite profitable.
“FPV glasses exist, we didn’t invent them. However, we’ve found a way to make such glasses the best in the world, to make our product competitive on the global market. It’s a small niche in the industry, there are maybe 100,000 people in the world who are our potential customers, but for a small Osijek company, we can make a good living from it. As the glasses business grew, so did our focus on it. A year ago, we made our first investment and now eyewear development is our primary business,” concluded Kovačević.
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