As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working — to identify when they need repairs, and what is wrong with them — has raised $72.5 million in funding, money that it will be using both to bring on new customers, and to continue development on its technology.
The company to date has monitored more than half a billion hours of machine operations, covering a wide variety of equipment manufacturers and processing. “We have by far the largest data set of mechanical signals,” CEO and founder Saar Yoskovitz said in an interview. He calls this trove of information “the malfunction dictionary.”
“We’re at the point, that, if you have a pump in your factory, we don’t need to build a model for your specific machine,” he said, “because we’ve seen over 20,000 pumps before.”
This equity investment is the first tranche of a Series F that the company has yet to fully close. Yoskovitz said the final amount is likely to be around $100 million and the round should be completed in the coming months. He declined to comment on valuation except to confirm that it is an upround and is over $1 billion.
Lightrock is leading this latest round with previous backers participating. That list includes Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Qumra Capital, a late-stage VC firm based out of Israel (Augury was founded in Haifa and now has a second HQ in New York), which led a $55 million round in 2020.
Augury’s raise comes on the heels of a strong wave of business since it last raised money in 2021, with revenues growing five-fold from customers that include major manufacturing companies like PepsiCo, Nestle, and Dupont, as well as a long list of companies in the gas and energy sector by way of a partnership with Baker Hughes, one of its strategic previous investors, which is a major services provider to the energy sector.
As Yoskovitz describes it, the Covid-19 pandemic really put supply chains into focus around the world. But while all the talk was about “digital transformation” in IT, at the industrial level that cycle was always going to be longer — much longer — since expensive equipment is rarely ripped out if it’s still working. Or even if it’s largely still working and just needs a little fix. Typical lifecycles can extend into decades in industrial environments.
That is where Augury comes into the picture: the company has built sensors that effectively sit within or alongside machines to listen to and observe how they work, and it’s been using that data to train its algorithms to understand when they are not working, and what might be wrong.
This then becomes the guide for humans who can then fix the machines. Those humans could be replaced by fixing robots, but they will still need the data to understand what to do, giving Augury a way of extending its data play into a future factory regardless of how many humans or robots are there.
But right now, it sounds like there are very few robots being used by Augury’s customers: Yoskovitz said that around 80% of its deployments are in legacy, “brownfield” environments, with the remaining 20% in “greenfield” factories built recently and with more modern equipment (yet still often absent of robotics).
It could be argued that Augury’s technology is another example of how AI is taking jobs away from people, but Yoskovitz presents a different take:
“The biggest challenge industry is facing is actually talent shortage,” he said. “There is a gap. There is an aging workforce, where all of the experts are going to retire in the next five or six years. And at the same time, the next generation is not coming in because no one wants to work in manufacturing.”
And when they do come in, he added, they will know less than the generation before because they will be more interchangeable and responsible for more (due to there being fewer of them).
Augury’s solution is to “digitize the knowledge” to help factories, and those working at them, then repair their equipment.
Lightrock, the lead investor in this round, focuses on sustainability investing, and that’s become an interesting field in the last year — not because of the opportunity and optimism, but actually the opposite.
Paul Murphy, a general partner at Lightspeed, summed up the situation well in a passionate argument that he called “RIP Climate Tech” which said, effectively, that due to changing regulatory and political climates, the days were numbered for startups and investors looking at sustainability as an altruistic goal in itself.
The next stage, for those who want to continue to put money behind their own sustainability goals, needed to be to focus on companies that addressed this but only while also building solid businesses regardless.
This is effectively where Augury sits, and one reason why Lightrock invested.
Building tech to help manufacturers use their equipment for longer is, essentially, a green ideal, he said.
“The thing is, even today, it’s surprising, but machines which are installed in factories run for 20 or 40, years. It’s a huge capex involvement, and so they don’t change a lot of parts in the factory. They don’t rip and replace the machines altogether,” said Ashish Puri, a partner at the firm who led the on the deal. The company marks sustainability as an important focus for its investing, and Puri describes it more specifically as “sustainable capitalism.”
“Augury is a good example of a business that marries productivity with a green approach,” he said.
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