EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Skype co-founder’s fund leads $10M round into industrial analytics startup Oden
Industrial analytics startup Oden Technologies Inc. today announced that it has landed a $10 million funding round to tackle inefficiencies in the manufacturing industry.
The lead investor was Atomico, a venture fund led by billionaire Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström. Existing Oden backers EQT Ventures and Inbox Capital participated in the round as well. The startup intends to spend the capital on widening the adoption of its analytics platform for manufacturers.
The offering consists of two components. The first is a hardware module that companies can link to their equipment and factory management software to collect operational data. This data is sent to Oden’s cloud-based analytics service, the other component of its platform, which crunches the measurements to shed light on what’s happening on the production floor.
Oden promises to provide visibility into just about every major aspect of a factory’s operations. According to the startup, its platform processes data points such as the temperatures in a furnace and the shape of individual assembly components to find potential quality issues. Companies can also analyze performance data from industrial machines to determine if maintenance work may be needed.
Oden believes that its platform can fill a big gap in the manufacturing industry. The startup cited research from Vorne Industries Inc., a production monitoring firm, that found the typical factory has an Overall Equipment Effectiveness score of about 60 percent. OEE is a metric for measuring efficiency in the industrial sector.
“Traditionally manufacturers did not have access to the right data and insights to make factories more efficient and productive,” Oden Chief Executive Officer Willem Sundblad said in a statement. “We want to democratize access to data analytics, making it easy to collect and action for anyone in the factory whether it’s an engineer, a plant manager or those responsible for operations and quality control.”
Oden will spend much of its new $10 million haul in expanding sales operations. The company plans to establish offices in Illinois, Ohio and Texas as part of the effort, while growing its product development team in conjunction.
Oden has raised about $16 million in funding to date.
Image: Unsplash
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