- pi Ventures, India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Blockchain focused early stage venture fund, led the funding round.
- SwitchOn will use the fresh funds for strengthening the edge-compute architecture, expanding the team and market adoption
Industrial IoT company SwitchOn has raised $1 million in a seed funding round led by piVentures. Along with pi, Axilor Ventures and eminent angel investors from The Chennai Angels also participated in the round.
By creating digital twins through AI at the edge, SwitchOn helps manufacturing industries identify plant-level bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency.
The company plans to use the fresh funds for strengthening the edge-compute architecture, expanding the team and market adoption in India and other countries in the EU and APAC region.
SwitchOn was founded by Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee in 2017. The company graduated from the Axilor Accelerator Program in 2018. It uses efficient edge computing systems to continuously analyse high-frequency data streams of vibration, temperature and energy consumption.
“With a unique humanized AI model, industries can predict hundreds of events to enable real-time manufacturing intelligence from the shop-floor to the top-floor,” the company said in its website.
According Aniruddha, they want to create state-of-the-art edge solutions for increasing transparency, reducing turn-around, and improving quality on the shop-floor of manufacturing industries to ultimately achieve operational excellence.
piVentures plans to invest in 18-20 deep-tech startups
piVentures, an Indian deep-tech focused venture capital fund, is currently investing from its ₹225 crore first fund, which it raised last year.
Manish Singhal, founding partner, pi Ventures, revealed that they chose to invest in SwitchOn because of “their clear understanding of the technology and customer needs.”
Another reason is SwitchO‘s minimally intrusive solution, which is the need of the hour in the industrial IoT space, he added.
piVentures plans to invest in 18-20 deep-tech startups across different verticals such as health-tech, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors. Currently, it is also investing in AI-based health startup SigTuple and AI-based logistics firm Locus, among others.
Inputs: Livemint/ IndianWeb2
