Sebastian Wendt
Sebastian Wendt founded „KWest GmbH“ on the 30th of April, 2001 together with a friend. Since the 1st of October, 2001, Sebastian Wendt is the only managing director.
The company started with 2 employees as rather generic engineering service provider for embedded hardware and software but soon specialized in the field of Automotive Multimedia and Communications by continuous buildup of know-how and realization of innovative product concepts.
Hence the client base in Europe grew steadily featuring well-known companies such as SonyEricsson, Audi, Loewe, Carl Zeiss or Siemens but also cutting-edge start-ups seeking for a capable partner to implement their products. KWest extended it’s offer by supporting the product beyond the development, managing production and after-sales service for it’s customers.
Through the convergence of In-Car Multimedia, Smartphones, Internet Service etc., KWest could further extend its business segment towards communication, network and IT electronics as internet and cellular network provider such as Telefonica O2, 1&1 or Vodafone placed orders for projects with KWest.
As the market for excellent engineers is small, KWest „grew“ it’s own employees. 80% of it’s employees started as graduates and already worked during their studies as interns or student assistants for KWest before writing their thesis in the company. The cooperation with university also covered mutual research projects
Beside the generic MD activities, Sebastian cared on it’s own about system and software architecture, product marketing and even partly about SW implementation of complex algorithms. This ensured he’d never lose contact to technicals – in contrast he even extended more and more his profound knowledge of Infotainment electronics.
When selling his debt-free company in June 2011 to the Blaupunkt Group, KWest had 37 full- time employees and made a yearly turnover of ~ 6 Mio €.
After 2 years, in 2013, working as CTO, Sebastian Wendts to go “back to the roots” and offer his work experience, his know-how and business network for customers of his own company “Wendt Engineering”.
After a long term cooperation with Gemmy Electronics in different customer projects, Gemmy Electronics, Sven Eckhardt and Sebastian Wendt plan to found crispAudio in 2017. All three parties become shareholder of crispAudio GmbH, a company that supply entire audio system solutions to car OEMs and tier1’s world-wide covering in-car connectivity, signal processing, embedded hardware and even loudspeakers.
