Initialized Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on the seed. Initialized has 6 investing partners and over $3.2B under management over five core funds since its founding in 2012. The firm's startups have created in aggregate over $200B in market value so far.

Initialized Capital

Lux Capital manages over $5 billion in assets focused on founding, seed, early-stage, and growth investments at the intersection of technology and the sciences. Lux takes an active role in helping entrepreneurs build successful businesses in high-growth sectors. Its investment team has built over 20 companies from scratch. Lux's investment strategy ensures portfolio companies are better connected, have a deeper insight, and command industry leadership faster than their competitors.

Lux Capital

Correlation Ventures is a new breed of venture capital firm, leveraging world-class analytics to offer entrepreneurs and other venture capitalists a dramatically better option when they are seeking additional capital to complete a financing round.

Correlation Ventures

Lorimer Ventures is an operator led investment firm backing bold entrepreneurs building exceptional B2B startups.

Lorimer Ventures

Team Builder Ventures is a venture capital fund that helps founders build teams. It aims to make investments in startups focused on developments in enterprise software and consumer internet. offer team building as a value-add for our investments.  The fund invests in the most compelling early-stage enterprise software and consumer Internet start-ups led by the top venture capital funds.   It was founded by Steven Lurie in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Team Builder Ventures

One Planet Group is a closely held private equity firm that owns a suite of online technology and media businesses while also investing in early-stage companies. Owned and operated businesses span a variety of industries including ad tech, publishing, and media. One Planet’s mission is to support strong business ideas while building an ethos that helps improve society and give back to communities.  Infused with foundational values which promote diversity and inclusion, unity, service to humanity, and excellence in all things, One Planet Group strives to foster an environment that promotes equality, love, and empowerment.  The company’s investment portfolio includes a diverse group of innovative tech-enabled products and solutions. Investing primarily in high-growth early-stage entities, the focus is on companies that aspire to the concept of ‘Innovation + Intention.’ Specific areas of focus include the future of mobility, education technology, health technology, and environmental solutions.  Core operating businesses for One Planet Group include Buyerlink, a leading online marketplace for performance-based marketing; AutoWeb Inc., an automotive matchmaking platform connecting in-market car shoppers to their preferred vehicle transactions; California.com, a curated guide to living in California; and Contractors.com, a site connecting homeowners and service providers. One Planet Group also operates BahaiTeachings.com, a non-profit platform that shares personal perspectives to promote the oneness of humanity. One Planet Group was founded by tech entrepreneur Payam Zamani in 2015. With offices and employees in over ten countries, its global headquarters is located in Walnut Creek, California.

One Planet Group

Blackhorn Ventures is an early-stage venture firm that invests in companies using cutting edge engineering to improve resource productivity. The firm was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.

Blackhorn Ventures

For US-based startups, identifying and accessing strategic partners in Asia can sometimes seem like a daunting challenge. With TransLink Capital’s support, guidance, and relationships with the most significant companies in Asia, our portfolio companies can develop the necessary long-term partnerships to transform their businesses and expand in Asia and beyond.

Translink Capital

FJ Labs is a stage-agnostic investment firm that focuses on marketplaces and consumer-facing startups. Their investments are seed and series A. The investment range of the company is $50,000 to $5,000,000. It invests in Alibaba Group, Beepi, BrightRoll, Betterment, Adore Me, and Earnest.

FJ Labs

NEC Corporation of America (NEC) is a leading technology integrator providing solutions that improve the way people work and communicate. NEC delivers integrated Solutions for Society that are aligned with our customers' priorities to create new value for people, businesses and society, with a special focus on safety, security and efficiency. They deliver one of the industry's strongest and most innovative portfolios of communications, analytics, security, biometrics and technology solutions that unleash customers’ productivity potential. Through these solutions, NEC combines its best-in-class solutions and technology, and leverages a robust partner ecosystem to solve today's most complex business problems.

NEC Corporation of America

Alumni Ventures Group provides high-quality, diversified venture portfolios to individual investors who previously haven't had access to VC. It helps accredited alums from top entrepreneurial schools invest together in the ventures of fellow alums. The firm backs companies with an alumni connection and an institutional lead investor with expertise in the space. AVG also offers focused funds that allow any accredited investor access to a venture portfolio, diversified by type, sector, stage, and geography. Beth Obermiller, Michael Madden, and Mike Collins co-founded the firm in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2013.

Alumni Ventures

Evolution-VC is involved in investments and strategic partnerships to create a global platform that unites leaders, investors & corporates.

Evolution Ventures

Mitsubishi Hc Capital America is to deliver social, environmental, and economic value for their customers and communities and supportive work environments. Their services include lending, transportation, floorplan financing, vendor finance, truck finance, funding, and tech finance.

Mitsubishi Hc Capital America

Formic Technologies

At Formic, we want to increase the collective output of humanity by making automation deployments trivial and easy. Every factory should have access to unlimited 'labor' through robotics and automation rentals. We are building technology, financing, operations and services to make this vision possible. Formic is a fast-growing venture-backed startup focused on unlocking robotic automation in labor-starved industries such as food and beverage, advanced manufacturing, consumer packaged goods and other industrial settings. We combine financial innovation with a firm understanding of what robotics are capable of, to enable manufacturing customers to scale up their manufacturing capacity quickly and with minimal risk.

Formic offers a robotics-as-a-service platform that provides a range of robotics software solutions across design, installation, programming, monitoring, and maintenance. Its flagship product is the “Formic Core” operating system that features a range of automation modules, including "Formic Stack," which focuses on the creation of automated palletizing systems, and "Formic Pack," for automated packaging.&nbsp;

Using data and automation to achieve 24/7 production.

Smart Factory

Formic

Formic Technologies Receives Investment from Mitsubishi Electric, ME Innovation Fund

Formic offers a robotics-as-a-service platform that provides a range of robotics software solutions across design, installation, programming, monitoring, and maintenance. Its flagship product is the “Formic Core” operating system that features a range of automation modules, including "Formic Stack," which focuses on the creation of automated palletizing systems, and "Formic Pack," for automated packaging.&nbsp;Additionally, the platform offers a performance dashboard and specification tools as well as AI-powered motion planning capabilities that allow users to make process updates without requiring advanced technical proficiency.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsThe company caters to the manufacturing, food processing, and logistics industries and applications such as palletizing, packaging, and material handling. Formic’s notable customers include Universal Robots, FANUC, KUKA, Honeywell, CAT, John Deere, Georgia Nut, the US Navy, and ABB.&nbsp;In January 2024, Formic announced a strategic partnership with Jacobi Robotics, an AI-driven motion planning software company, to integrate the latter’s technology into Formic's robotic solutions.

Avathon (formerly SparkCognition) offers a suite of AI-powered data analytics solutions for businesses, specializing in the industrial sector. The company’s offerings include: 1) Industrial AI Suite, which enables users to connect datasets with configurable AI models, identify and contextualize risks to equipment, analyze maintenance actions, monitor performance, and visualize multi-asset systems, without requiring coding experience, and 2) Visual AI Advisor, which leverages computer vision to analyze real-time data from existing camera infrastructure for a number of different use cases, such as safety monitoring, visual inspection, and machine monitoring.&nbsp;In May 2023, the company launched the Generative AI Suite, a solution specifically tailored for the industrial sector, which enables users to build and deploy custom large language models (LLMs) on either private or on-premise cloud environments. Users also autonomously augment data sets by generating text, images, audio, and other signals and create imagery for use in simulated real-world environments. It claims to&nbsp;reduce the foundational information needed for decision-making by up to 20x.Since 2021, the company has acquired a number of companies to further develop its product offering. This includes Indian visual AI startup&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9370?industryIds=6">Integration Wizards</a> (March 2022) to expand its intellectual property (IP) portfolio to improve vision capabilities as well as digital knowledge platform Maana (July 2021), software developer for the renewable energy industry Ensemble Energy (May 2021), and financial technology company AIM2 (February 2021).&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/34997">In October 2024,&nbsp;</a>Avathon unveiled a new system-level AI platform that provides solutions for managing and monitoring critical industrial infrastructure. The AI platform addresses various industrial issues, including maximizing the uptime of capital-intensive assets, enabling efficient manufacturing ramp-up, and ensuring worker safety in industrial settings.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsSparkCognition’s clientele comprises large companies such as Boeing, Hitachi, and British Petroleum. It has also built partnerships with Google for cloud platform services, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to offer AI predictive maintenance on HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems, and OSIsoft to integrate SparkCognition’s machine learning technology with OSIsoft’s PI system to improve data and process data analytics.&nbsp;

Avathon

Sight Machine offers a manufacturing data platform that captures and contextualizes data from factories to deliver a system-wide view of the manufacturing process as well as individual assets. The platform transforms raw plant data as well as data from machines of various manufacturers into a standardized data foundation and provides actionable insights for a range of use cases such as predictive maintenance, quality improvement, and capacity utilization. Users can analyze all assets, data sources, and processes by creating digital twins, thereby improving processes, quality, and productivity.&nbsp;In October 2022, Sight Machine introduced <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13696?industryIds=6">Blueprint</a>, a tool developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and Microsoft, which uses AI for high-speed, automated data labeling. The company claims that this solution enables manufacturers to analyze up to 100x more of their data than traditional methods.&nbsp; Key customers and partnershipsSight Machine caters to at least 15 verticals, such as food and beverage, electronics, and automotive. Its global clientele includes Fortune 500 companies such as Nissan, Heineken, Westrock Co., and Asian Paints.&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21955">In September 2023</a>, Sight Machine partnered with LS Electric, a power and automation solutions provider, to create an AI-driven Big Data analytics platform tailored for the manufacturing and energy sectors. In December 2023, the company went on to partner with Teamviewer, a remote collaboration solutions provider, to offer a joint product that combines the latter’s remote connectivity and industrial AR solutions with its real-time data and analysis for industrial processes.&nbsp;Sight Machine has established partnerships with large global companies such as Microsoft, Google, Databricks, Siemens, and AWS to integrate with their data analytics platforms and Fujitsu to help with wide deployments. In July 2023, the platform also became a certified Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing partner and released Factory CoPilot, integrating its Manufacturing Data Platform with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to offer GenAI capabilities for manufacturing analysis and real-time insights. The company went on to launch the<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33441"> Sight Machine connector for Databricks</a> (in September 2024), to integrate its manufacturing data platform with the latter’s data intelligence platform.

Sight Machine

Overview offers smart cameras and AI to enable users to monitor manufacturing equipment and robots and identify defects in real time before significant damage or downtime is incurred. The technology has a repository of machine data so that there is a traceable visual record of all units.&nbsp;With AI, the cause of production issues and quality concerns can be identified either on-site or remotely. The company claims over time, the deep learning computer vision algorithms allow for any sudden substantial increases in production and improved yields. Moreover, it reportedly offers 100% visual traceability and an over 99.9% uptime.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsAs of September 2024, the solution was used by a number of enterprises, including Schaeffler, ThermoFischer, Honda, Caterpillar, and Tyson.&nbsp;

Overview

Bright Machines combines robotics, machine learning, and computer vision to provide automation applications for the electronics manufacturing industry. Its flagship product is the “Bright Machines Microfactory,” a pre-integrated, programmable assembly line that can be deployed in existing and new production facilities. The Microfactory runs on the company's proprietary “Brightware” cloud-based software platform, offering a scalable solution that enables manufacturers to enhance supply chain resilience and adapt production capacity according to market demand. This software-defined manufacturing allows factories to change the products that they manufacture if needed. The company offers its service on a subscription-based microfactory-as-a-service (MaaS) business model.The company reportedly generated USD 83 million in revenue in 2021. In May 2021, Bright Machines reported that its revenue doubled each year since its inception (2018) and forecasts a 5-year CAGR (2020-2025) of over 84%.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsBright Machines served over 40 manufacturing companies as of October 2022.The company collaborated with Microsoft Azure in May 2024 to leverage the latter’s infrastructure to deliver a full-stack environment for all stages of the manufacturing lifecycle.The company also has distribution/sales partnerships with Anstar Corporation (April 2021), SMT Capital (April 2021), MaRC Technologies (May 2021), PAC Global (May 2021), Restronics (June 2021), <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/3618">BROCK Electronics</a> (June 2021), <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4740">Murray Percival</a> (July 2021), <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4412">Competitive Edge Manufacturing Equipment</a> (CEME; July 2021).Key competitors: None comparable (Bright Machines is the only company in the smart factory industry that offers microfactories-as-a-service, which combines intelligent software with adaptive hardware to automate manufacturing processes.)

Bright Machines

Augury offers AI-based predictive maintenance solutions. It uses wireless halo sensors to record the vibration, temperature, and magnetism of machines and upload them to the cloud, where AI will be used to diagnose faults and predict potential malfunctions. The system can predict failures and provide early, actionable insights on equipment status, allowing companies to plan maintenance more effectively. Augury offers Machine Health solutions for Critical Assets (MH CR) and Supporting Equipment (MH SE).&nbsp;Furthermore, it offers a warranty policy (one-of-a-kind in the predictive maintenance field) for up to USD 100,000 of repairs and replacements if the software fails to successfully predict machine faults. The company reported that its machine health (predictive maintenance) solutions can deliver an ROI of 3x–10x. In December 2023, the company launched a product loss guarantee solution, in partnership with HSB, which covers a broader range of production-related assets, including protection against production loss due to mechanical failures.&nbsp;In May 2022, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/10286">Augury acquired Seebo,</a> another Israeli company that offers predictive quality and yield solutions for manufacturers to identify process-driven inefficiencies.&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsAugury has built a customer base consisting of companies such as Hershey’s, Colgate-Palmolive, Grundfos, Heineken, Danone, and Bausch Health. The company announced an insurance plan for its customers in 2020, partly as a strategy to attract more customers. Augury’s Machine Health Solutions are integrated with PTC’s ThingWorx IoT through a partnership in July 2020 and are available in the PTC Marketplace. In October 2021, it partnered with Baker Hughes, a provider of energy technology solutions, which integrated Augury’s solutions into its System 1 software and asset performance management (APM) solutions. It went on to integrate Baker Hughes’ “Ranger Pro” wireless condition monitoring sensor and “Cordant” gateway into its platform in June 2024.&nbsp;In November 2023, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23991">Augury partnered with IFS Ultimo</a>, a provider of cloud-based enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions, to offer machine health monitoring and asset management workflows for industries. It went on to partner with DSV, a logistics solutions provider, in March 2024, to introduce a new Parts As a Service (PaaS) solution. The solution utilizes machine health to predict machine faults and enables users to automate the procurement of replacement parts.

Augury

Companies that provide robotic fleet management software, robotic automation software, and inspection software.

Companies that provide an industrial IoT platform across factories as the primary offering.

Companies that provide cobots, sorting/ picking robotics, modular production robotics, and microfactories.

Companies that focus on data analytics for operations streamlining and process optimization, and may offer predictive maintenance.

Companies that provide autonomous mobile robots (AMR) or self-driving vehicles (SDV) used in manufacturing/ factory operations.

Companies that monitor the manufacturing equipment and assembly lines.

Companies that provide predictive maintenance as a primary offering. 

Creates digital twins of assets and processes to help manufacturers improve processes, quality, and productivity

Connected devices, sensors, IoT, and analytics are used to optimize factory operations

Uses advanced robotics, AMRs, and related software to improve the efficiency of factory operations

Uses connected devices and sensors to gather data—IIoT, predictive analysis, and equipment inspection

Uses AI/ML to analyze data for predictive maintenance and AI-based vision systems for line inspections

5G standard allows for faster reaction times and supports high connection densities

Uses edge computing for data processing at the edge

Some companies in the predictive maintenance space uses generative AI to generate possible alternative scenarios

<div>
 
 Formic, a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) platform, has obtained USD 27.4 million in a Series A funding round. This round saw contributions from Blackhorn Ventures, Mitsubishi HC Capital America, NEC, Translink Capital, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, and Lorimer Ventures. This has now brought the total funding for the company to over USD 59 million.
 The company is set to use these funds to grow its range of standardized equipment, extend its support network across the US, and enhance its equipment-neutral robotic automation software.
 Formic's RaaS platform offers a host of robotics services including design, installation, programming, monitoring, and maintenance. The company's signature services are the "Formic Stack," for the development of automated palletizing systems, and "Formic Pack" for automated packaging. It also offers a range of software tools aimed at robotic programming, motion planning, fleet management, monitoring, and specification identification.
 
</div>

Formic

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