SUCCESS STORY
Vaultgroup co-founder and COO Lance Baum, CEO Michael Gewer.
Vaultgroup: tackling crime with home-grown tech Back in 2014, running a cellphone store was a dangerous business to be in. Robberies were a daily occurrence, with heavily armed robbers striking almost with impunity. Barge in. Hold the staff at gunpoint. Open the safe. Grab the goods, and bingo! For serial entrepreneur Michael Gewer, who was managing a division at a large cellular dealer at the time, there had to be a better way.
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hen, driving home one day, Gewer had his ‘Eureka moment’. What if he were to build a secure locker with separate compartments, each with its own time delay? No robber would wait around to get one phone every five minutes. “If you think about a robbery, the thieves have everything on their side: inside information, the fear factor, the element of surprise. The one thing they don’t have is time. So we set out to create a product that builds time into the process,” says Gewer. It was a revolutionary idea. There was just one problem: the product didn’t exist
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anywhere in the world, and would have to be conceptualised and created from scratch. Gewer needed an engineer to help design and build the kit – and his lifelong friend, technology entrepreneur Lance Baum, was just the person for the job. SA solutions, for SA problems And so, one of South Africa’s emerging security technology success stories, VaultGroup, was born. Gewer and Baum patented the idea, and started working on various designs and technologies. After several months, they had built their first working product, aptly named
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA FEBRUARY 2021
CellVault™. It was a huge step for the young company: a home-grown solution, for a uniquely South African business problem. Even so, getting mobile phone retailers to buy into a brand-new, untested concept proved challenging at first. Just to get their foot in the door, Gewer and Baum persuaded ten stores to try CellVault™ as a proof of concept. Their breakthrough came when one of the pilot retail stores was hit by robbers. The store lost around R1-million in high-end cellphones from its standard safe; zero from its Cellvault™. The credentials were established.
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