Augury landed $25 million in Series C funding earlier this year. Now, it’s brought in even more, with an $8 million venture round from Qualcomm Ventures announced Thursday.
The New York- and Israel-based startup’s momentum reflects investors’ interest in an emerging market, the industrial internet of things (IIOT), which is expected to be a $750 billion global industry by 2023.
While connected devices have long monitored high-dollar machines like aircraft engines for potential problems, cloud and edge computing have opened the door for wider use in industrial settings.
Now, IIOT devices are collecting data on everything from commercial refrigerators to industrial HVAC machines. In the future, they may make their way into your kitchen and boiler room, as well.
Here’s how Augury’s products work: A piece of machinery that’s about to break makes a different sound than one that’s in good shape — even if that difference isn’t perceptible to human ears.
Augury’s sensors attach to machines and record data like sound and temperature. Then, the company’s cloud-based, AI-driven software analyzes the data for abnormalities and makes maintenance recommendations.
But it doesn’t stop there. The software employs machine learning algorithms that process data from normal and broken machines across all Augury’s customers. The more problems this artificial intelligence encounters, the more adept it gets at identifying warning signs. So the system becomes more precise with time — and at scale — and customers never start from scratch with a newly connected machine.
For Augury’s customers, which include multiple Fortune 500 companies, it says, the system’s maintenance recommendations cut expenses and reduce the “downtime” in which machines can’t operate.
In fact, the company says its technology helped customers equip 70,000 machines, save 3,000 from damage and avoid 7,000 breakdowns. That reduces breakdowns by 75 percent and asset costs by 30 percent while increasing the time machines are available by 45 percent, the company told VentureBeat.
Alongside its January Series C, Augury acquired machine learning startup Alluvium and its platform that gleans operational insights from mechanical data. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
At eight years old, Augury has raised a total of $59 million. Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re/HSB Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Lerer Hippeau.
