Augury Raises $75M to Expand AI-Driven Industrial Health Solutions

Israeli industrial health AI co Augury raises $75m

Israeli industrial AI company Augury has raised $75 million in new funding to expand its machine health and process optimization solutions, with revenue growing five-fold since its last round in 2021 Israeli AI machine health and process health solutions company Augury has announced the completion of a $75 million financing round led by Lightrock with participation from existing investors Insight Partners, Eclipse, and Qumra Capital as well as Schneider Electric Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. The new round represents an increase in valuation for Augury, which maintains its position as a 'unicorn' startup. Since its last financing round in 2021, Augury's revenue has risen five-fold, and its customer base of Fortune 500 manufacturers has tripled -- customers include PepsiCo, DuPont, and Colgate-Palmolive. The company has also expanded its product portfolio from asset performance and reliability to incorporate AI driven solutions for process optimization. Augury was founded in 2011 by CEO Saar Yoskovitz and CPTO Gal Shaul Yoskovitz said, "Augury has a long history of firsts, from the introduction of prescriptive AI-driven solutions that eliminate downtime and the first truly global-scale Industrial IoT deployments in our category to the introduction of AI solutions that encompass both machine and process health. With this new funding we will continue that track record, breaking new ground in the introduction of Agentic-AI capabilities that build on our expertise and that our customers can trust across their most critical assets and processes." Augury has also announced the appointment of Elan Greenberg as Chief Operating Officer. Greenberg has helped scale category-leading businesses, such as Flock Safety and DoorDash, solving complex operating problems with an emphasis on customer satisfaction. "We are proud of our position as a leader in Industrial AI," added Yoskovitz. "But we see our accomplishments to-date as simply the preparation for the opportunity we have ahead of us. We are excited to partner with the world's leading manufacturers to usher in a new generation of AI and push the boundaries of human productivity." Sign up for the Business & Innovation Newsletter >>

Augury raises $75M for AI-driven industrial equipment health and repair process optimization

Augury raises $75M for AI-driven industrial equipment health and repair process optimization Israel-based Augury Inc., a provider of internet of things sensors and artificial intelligence to predict machine repairs, today announced it raised $75 million in a Series F funding round. Lightrock led the round, with returning investors participating including Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Qumra Capital. Manufacturing and industrial businesses turn to Augury to optimize their factory floor maintenance processes by installing IoT sensors directly on equipment. The sensors are equipped with temperature, ultrasonic vibration and magnetic field detectors that stream real-time measurements. The company uses AI algorithms based on the type of equipment and its operation to predict potential maintenance issues, prevent failures and understand what might be wrong with a machine. This allows repair teams to quickly source repair parts and schedule outages to increase availability. "Augury has a long history of firsts, from the introduction of prescriptive AI-driven solutions that eliminate downtime and the first truly global-scale Industrial IoT deployments in our category to the introduction of AI solutions that encompass both machine and process health," said Saar Yoskovitz, Augury co-founder and chief executive. Yokovitz said the new funding would go towards continuing to develop the company's detection technology and to include agentic AI capabilities. This will provide additional guidance to customers about how to act on real-time data from machines and strategize process maintenance to reduce waste and energy consumption. Since the company's last funding round in 2021, Augury said it has achieved over 500 million hours of analysis on its platform and an estimated $1 billion of value generated for customers using its health solutions across 40 countries. The company boasts customers including giant enterprise industrial businesses including PepsiCo, Inc., DuPont de Nemours, Inc. and Colgate-Palmolive Co. Yoskovitz said he believes Augury is positioned as a leader in industrial AI but the company will not be sitting on its laurels. "[W]e see our accomplishments to date as simply the preparation for the opportunity we have ahead of us," he added.

Augury raises $73M on a $1B+ valuation for AI to detect malfunctions in factory machines | TechCrunch

As companies like Nvidia and SoftBank make industrial robotics into a key focus for future R&D, a startup has raised funding today for another facet of how AI is being used on the factory room floor. Augury, which develops AI-based hardware that measures vibrations, sound, temperature and other factors to understand how machines are working -- to identify when they need repairs, and what is wrong with them -- has raised $72.5 million in funding, money that it will be using both to bring on new customers, and to continue development on its technology. The company to date has monitored more than half a billion hours of machine operations, covering a wide variety of equipment manufacturers and processing. "We have by far the largest data set of mechanical signals," CEO and founder Saar Yoskovitz said in an interview. He calls this trove of information "the malfunction dictionary." "We're at the point, that, if you have a pump in your factory, we don't need to build a model for your specific machine," he said, "because we've seen over 20,000 pumps before." This equity investment is the first tranche of a Series F that the company has yet to fully close. Yoskovitz said the final amount is likely to be around $100 million and the round should be completed in the coming months. He declined to comment on valuation except to confirm that it is an upround and is over $1 billion. Lightrock is leading this latest round with previous backers participating. That list includes Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Qumra Capital, a late-stage VC firm based out of Israel (Augury was founded in Haifa and now has a second HQ in New York), which led a $55 million round in 2020. Augury's raise comes on the heels of a strong wave of business since it last raised money in 2021, with revenues growing five-fold from customers that include major manufacturing companies like PepsiCo, Nestle, and Dupont, as well as a long list of companies in the gas and energy sector by way of a partnership with Baker Hughes, one of its strategic previous investors, which is a major services provider to the energy sector. As Yoskovitz describes it, the Covid-19 pandemic really put supply chains into focus around the world. But while all the talk was about "digital transformation" in IT, at the industrial level that cycle was always going to be longer -- much longer -- since expensive equipment is rarely ripped out if it's still working. Or even if it's largely still working and just needs a little fix. Typical lifecycles can extend into decades in industrial environments. That is where Augury comes into the picture: the company has built sensors that effectively sit within or alongside machines to listen to and observe how they work, and it's been using that data to train its algorithms to understand when they are not working, and what might be wrong. This then becomes the guide for humans who can then fix the machines. Those humans could be replaced by fixing robots, but they will still need the data to understand what to do, giving Augury a way of extending its data play into a future factory regardless of how many humans or robots are there. But right now, it sounds like there are very few robots being used by Augury's customers: Yoskovitz said that around 80% of its deployments are in legacy, "brownfield" environments, with the remaining 20% in "greenfield" factories built recently and with more modern equipment (yet still often absent of robotics). It could be argued that Augury's technology is another example of how AI is taking jobs away from people, but Yoskovitz presents a different take: "The biggest challenge industry is facing is actually talent shortage," he said. "There is a gap. There is an aging workforce, where all of the experts are going to retire in the next five or six years. And at the same time, the next generation is not coming in because no one wants to work in manufacturing." And when they do come in, he added, they will know less than the generation before because they will be more interchangeable and responsible for more (due to there being fewer of them). Augury's solution is to "digitize the knowledge" to help factories, and those working at them, then repair their equipment. Lightrock, the lead investor in this round, focuses on sustainability investing, and that's become an interesting field in the last year -- not because of the opportunity and optimism, but actually the opposite. Paul Murphy, a general partner at Lightspeed, summed up the situation well in a passionate argument that he called "RIP Climate Tech" which said, effectively, that due to changing regulatory and political climates, the days were numbered for startups and investors looking at sustainability as an altruistic goal in itself. The next stage, for those who want to continue to put money behind their own sustainability goals, needed to be to focus on companies that addressed this but only while also building solid businesses regardless. This is effectively where Augury sits, and one reason why Lightrock invested. Building tech to help manufacturers use their equipment for longer is, essentially, a green ideal, he said. "The thing is, even today, it's surprising, but machines which are installed in factories run for 20 or 40, years. It's a huge capex involvement, and so they don't change a lot of parts in the factory. They don't rip and replace the machines altogether," said Ashish Puri, a partner at the firm who led the on the deal. The company marks sustainability as an important focus for its investing, and Puri describes it more specifically as "sustainable capitalism." "Augury is a good example of a business that marries productivity with a green approach," he said.