Why We Are Raising a Series B

MachineMetrics was started back in 2015 to transform the manufacturing industry with real-time data from machines. Before starting to build the product, we had interviewed about 100 small to mid-sized manufacturers, and concluded the following:

1. Executives thought that their machine utilization rate was 60-70%, but it seemed like the actual rate was lower (later we discovered that the industry average is under 30%)
2. ERP systems were used to track production, but data has to be hand entered at the end of the day or shift. There was no real-time production visibility. Some factories resorted to operators writing on a whiteboard every hour to track their production.
3. Machines would often be down for unplanned maintenance issues such as unexpected tool failure, or other issues
4. Manufacturers had a hard time filling skilled operator roles required to setup and program machines, load material, change tools, and perform regular maintenance
5. More experienced operators will listen to a machine to determine if a machine was running properly. This tribal knowledge is disappearing as these operators enter retirement. 

For small to mid-sized manufacturers, existing machine monitoring systems have been available for some time, but most of these legacy systems run on-premises, requiring on-site integrators to install, and requiring a team of IT professionals to manage. The data these systems capture is limited to basic production and machine alarms.

Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT have become the top of mind over the past 2-3 years, yet these technologies require years to develop, costing millions of dollars and only accessible to the largest of manufacturers. Even those early adopters who invested in large, bulky, difficult-to-implement IoT initiatives are finding that these systems do not scale to more advanced data and analytics that drive true automation.

The pandemic over the last 15 months has shown us that much of our supply chain relies on machine operators being on-site, and even lower-cost regions like India are having a very difficult time bringing back operators to run machines. This has accelerated automation and Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing globally, not just in the United States and Europe. 

We set out 6 years ago to build a modern industrial data platform for machines that could be installed without any outside integrators for small to mid-sized discrete manufacturers. We have achieved this first step in our mission through our Series A more than 2 years ago that allowed us to grow to our current size with 48 employees, hundreds of customers, and thousands of machines connected to our platform. This past year, 85% of the machines that have connected to the MachineMetrics platform have been achieved by our customers, without requiring on-site visits, while demonstrating value such that over 90% of our customers renew their subscriptions year over year.

We continue to work to fulfill our mission to build the operating system for the autonomous factory. We are successfully displaying data in real-time helping operators to keep their machines running, and helping executives to make key business decisions. We are building a digital fingerprint of machine operation from embedded sensors within machines. This enables us to predictively prevent machines from failing, and prevent the machine from producing poor quality parts and anticipate machine failure by sending instructions directly to the machine. Robotics plays a key role in the 3rd component of this autonomous operating system, and the Series B investment led by Teradyne, a robotics company, will help us achieve this goal. This $20 million in funding will be used to scale our sales, marketing, and customer operations teams while increasing our investment into the product. 

• We will approximately double the size of our 48 person strong team over the next few months
• We will continue to make our product easier to use, adding more polish and speed to what is already a best-in-class user experience
• We will be investing heavily in our edge technology and opening our APIs on the edge to allow others to securely deploy software that runs right at their machines.
• We will grow our data science team, developing industry-first sensorless predictive and advanced analytic algorithms from the high-frequency data we are capturing from thousands of machines
• We will be expanding our partner ecosystem with more out-of-the-box integrations into other best-of-breed factory systems such as ERP/MES, CMMS, Visual Work Instructions, and Business Intelligence.
• We will be enhancing our enterprise capabilities 

We couldn’t be more excited to continue this journey with Teradyne as our lead Series B investor and partner. Teradyne is a $2 billion robotics and test company that manufactures Universal Robotics (UR), industry-leading co-bots. As our customers invest more in automation, we are seeing many customers use UR Robots to replace tedious manual work around their machines such as loading material and parts into the machine. As the use of these robots expands, having accessible real-time data that control the operations of the machine will drive additional value as humans, machines, and robots work together on the factory floor autonomously.

Read the complete press release: MachineMetrics Announces $20M Series B Funding Round