Bengaluru-based IoT startup SwitchOn has raised ₹7 crores in seed funding from pi Ventures. Axilor ventures and some angel investors from The Chennai Angels also participated in the funding round. The startup plans to use the funds to strengthen its architecture of edge computing and expand to new markets in India and other countries in the Europe and Asia-Pacific region.
Founded by Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee in 2017, the industrial IoT company helps manufacturing industries identify plant-level bottlenecks and improve equipment efficiency. The startup enables industries to create digital twins of their heavy assets in order to monitor and predict availability and performance in advance. The startup was also a part of the 2018 summer cohort of the Axilor Accelerator Program.
Commenting on the investment, founding partner of pi Ventures, Manish Singhal said, “What attracted us to invest in them was their clear understanding of the technology and customer needs. Another winning point was their minimally intrusive solution, the need of the hour in the Industrial IoT space.”
pi Ventures focuses on deep-tech early-stage startups and has invested in healthtech startup SigTuple, logistics startup Locus.sh and blockchain startup OweMe among several others.
SwitchOn has created its proprietary algorithm that combines electrical data, vibration data, and other signals to give accurate digital twin of the machine. This helps in increasing machine availability and predictive maintenance by enhancing operations transparency. The startup has its own hardware that attaches on the top of the machine. The startup targets automotive and FMCG manufacturing units as its customers.
According to a Polaris Market study, the global Industrial IoT market will touch the $771.71 billion valuations by 2026. The operations in the industries are still highly manual with only 8 percent of the pre-existing sensors in the machines connected to the internet. This poses a huge opportunity to automate various aspects of industrial machines.
SwitchOn’s competitor Altizon has also raised ₹49 crores ($7 million) from Singapore-based subsidiary of TVS Motors in April this year.
