Arnold Wierzejski

Founding CTHINGS.CO

In 2018 I was Business Development Director at Nokia in Vienna, and the first designs of CTHINGS.CO were already on paper. Two years later I turned down an offer I could not refuse and founded the company in Warsaw, in November 2020. The first idea was sensors and software for tracking product rotation in shops and warehouses. The pandemic pushed us towards something broader: a platform for industrial monitoring, infrastructure and energy.

That platform is Orchestra. It orchestrates edge computing in a secure and seamless way: applications of many kinds run in real time on gateways and edge devices, close to where their results touch our lives, from mission-critical infrastructure and industrial processes to enterprise buildings and retail.

What CTHINGS.CO stands for

• Foundations first. We build on solid technology and do not cut corners, because growth that skips the technology does not last.
• Open beats closed. Older closed standards are no longer enough in the AI era, so we design for integration.
• Through integrators. We partner with large telecoms and industrial integrators instead of chasing many small deployments.
• Without borders. Our team of 60+ comes from seven nationalities.

The potential it opened

On the business side, CTHINGS.CO has raised PLN 29.5M in three rounds: PLN 3M from Invento Capital and Satus Starter, PLN 6.5M from Level2 Ventures and Satus in 2021, and a PLN 20M Series A from Orlen VC, PKO VC, Freya Capital and Level2 Ventures at the end of 2023. Today Orchestra Platform manages edge computing infrastructure in real deployments: more than 15,000 advanced Edge IoT Gateways, with hundreds of thousands of sensors connected to them in total. For our customers this infrastructure is mission-critical and business-critical. Sales keep growing despite a cold startup market.

On the technology side, Orchestra solves the problems that make edge computing hard in practice. A real fleet mixes hardware from many vendors, dozens of wireless and cellular protocols, unreliable links and devices installed for a decade in harsh places. Orchestra runs on top of all of it: it onboards devices, deploys containerised workloads and updates them over the air, and keeps the whole fleet visible and governed in real time, from the edge to the cloud. Every gateway runs OrchestraOS, a hardened operating system built with security by design and aligned with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

That foundation makes the next layer possible. Networks between devices are defined and reconfigured in software instead of by hand, and AI models run on the gateway itself, next to the sensor, so decisions are made on the spot and do not depend on a connection to the cloud. One platform replaces one-off integrations, which lets an integrator deploy the same stack in a utility network, a production plant, an office building and a retail chain. The goal is to become the standard for integrators across those applications and a global leader in our niche.

Before CTHINGS.CO

I spent the first decade of my career inside large technology companies, moving step by step from engineering to business. As a student at Samsung I optimised the radio protocol configurations of new smartphones as LTE networks entered the market, and in 2013 I received the best engineer award. At Qucell Networks I learned how engineering becomes a product, at T-Mobile I specialised in the Internet of Things, and at Nokia in Vienna, as Business Development Director, I sold network solutions to operators and corporations across markets. Every step was about the same thing: connected devices.

I wanted to create something meaningful and answer market needs that other companies could not meet.

I will be satisfied if we manage to build a profitable international company. The way there is to become the standard for integrators in mission-critical infrastructure, industrial processes, enterprise buildings and retail, and a global leader in our niche.