SwitchOn, an Industrial Automation company that excels in Industrial IoT and Machine Learning announced today that it has raised $1 mn in a seed round of funding which was led by the country’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Blockchain focused early stage venture fund pi Ventures. There were others Angels also that participated in this funding round led by pi Ventures.
About SwitchOn
SwitchOn is an Industrial tech company that uses technologies such as Industrial IoT and machine learning to digitize critical equipment for industries. Monitoring and predicting availability and performance bottlenecks in advance can help industries create digital twins of their heavy assets. The company started in 2017, have Digital Twins meant for energy optimization and predictive maintenance to help their customers reduce unplanned downtime, improve operational efficiency and maximize asset utilization.
SwitchOn uses efficient edge computing systems to continuously analyze high-frequency data streams of Vibration, temperature and energy consumption. With a unique humanized AI model, and advanced workflows deeply integrated with the IoT system, industries can predict hundreds of events to enable real-time Manufacturing Intelligence from the shop-floor to the top-floor and take immediate action. The founders of the company, Aniruddha Banerjee and Avara Banerjee, both have a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering. SwitchOn helps in the identification of plant-level bottlenecks and improve equipment efficiency to the manufacturing industries, thereby ensuring a better efficiency for the equipment and the plant.
With their solution, the company is poised to be a dominant player in the Industrial IoT space which is expected to be >$200B by 2023. Industrial operations for a large part are still highly manual with only 8% of the pre-existing sensors in the machines are connected to the internet. With ample opportunity and need to automate various aspects of a machine to achieve a reduction in downtime, improve operational efficiency and maximize asset utilization, the industrial IoT market is set to advance rapidly.
About pi Ventures
pi Ventures is India’s first applied AI, ML, IoT and Blockchain focused early stage venture fund which is a $33 million fund based in Bangalore and invests around $1 million per startup. It is backed by leading entrepreneurs worldwide. The company brings hands-on product and entrepreneurial experience to the India venture investing ecosystem. The focus areas of pi Ventures are on healthcare, logistics, retail, fin-tech and enterprise sectors.
Accelerator Program
SwitchOn graduated from the Axilor Accelerator Program in the year 2018. SwitchOn has seen the Automotive and FMCG Discrete Manufacturing as the key industries to have significant traction in both India and APAC markets. These funds will help in strengthening the edge-compute architecture thereby helping in the expansion of the market adoption in India and other countries in the EU and APAC region.
Co-Founder of SwitchOn Aniruddha Banerjee said that the company, in order to increase transparency, reduce turn-around and improve the on the shop-floor of manufacturing industries, is leveraging deep expertise in hardware and software design to create state-of-the-art edge solutions. This will ultimately help them in achieving operational excellence. He said that he is excited about the new investment and the deep expertise of their investors in scaling IP-led hardware-software businesses. “We believe that our customers will benefit heavily from our expanded global footprint and deep technology differentiators,” he said.
The SwitchOn solution: SwitchOn has a proprietary set of algorithms which combines vibration data, electrical data and other signals to give accurate and relevant Digital Twin of the machine. This leads to a variety of outcomes for their clients across the globe – from the transparency of the operations to increase the availability of the machine to predictive maintenance.
SwitchOn has its own hardware which attaches on top of the machine (non-intrusive) along with the ability to carry out complex number crunching. The implementation of their technology reduces the need to transfer gigabytes of data to the cloud thus saving valuable dollars and achieve a faster turnaround on the insights. The solution is implemented very simply – it almost attaches itself like Fitbit and does not need a deep integration.
The pi Ventures Founding Partner, Manish Singhal, added that the clear understanding of the technology and customer needs of SwitchOn attracted them to invest in them. The company’s minimally intrusive solution added as another winning point to their decision of investing. He said that they are happy to partner with a brilliant team working hard at addressing a crucial need.
