Tractian, a leader in industrial IoT and enterprise asset management software, announced $45 million in growth capital led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investor Next47 and strategic angels – including Ronan de Hooge, VP of Cloud Platform of AVEVA, Ron Gill, former SAP and Netsuite CFO, and Andy McCall, former Samsara CRO – to revolutionize the lives of maintenance professionals with its hardware-software solution. The new funding comes as Tractian’s asset monitoring system reaches over 1,000 industrial plants, and positions the company to rapidly scale customer enablement while investing in new technology innovation for its maintenance operators.
“Tractian’s team demonstrates an incredible ability to iterate on products at a rapid pace. They do this by partnering closely with customers who strive to take availability, safety, and reliability to the next level as they modernize industrial asset management.”
Tractian offers an industrial operations platform and sensors that monitor the health of critical machines and prevent unplanned downtime, to give maintenance technicians and industrial decision-makers comprehensive oversight of their operations. Tractian operates across a wide range of verticals including food & beverage, automotive, consumer goods, mining, oil & gas, commodities manufacturing, etc. In both discrete and continuous manufacturing, unplanned downtime has serious consequences. The majority of plants operate on reactive maintenance strategies which means that when a piece of equipment fails, a work order is issued and the machine receives attention, often leading to downtime.
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Tractian’s solutions are used in environments that address a combined total of 5% of global industrial output. The company’s broad market reach is evidenced in its customer base from various industries, such as John Deere, Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar, Goodyear, Carrier, Johnson Controls, and Bimbo, the owner of the brands Little Bites and Thomas Bagels. Tractian’s customers see a 6-12x ROI with savings of $6,000 per monitored machine annually on average.
In a major milestone and a first for the industry, Tractian launched the AI-Assisted Maintenance category in the industrial sector early this summer. In this new paradigm, artificial intelligence identifies machine problems and suggests preventive actions to be taken, giving invaluable insight and support to maintenance professionals. It is important to highlight that the intent of Assisted Maintenance is firmly rooted in augmenting maintenance professionals to provide more assertive diagnosis with human-in-the-loop feedback.
Tractian’s solutions help operators to quickly diagnose and resolve maintenance issues. This has the potential to ease the pressure of the widening labor gap in the trades through technology. This will help operators in industrial settings better train, manage and implement their workforces.
“We want to be world-class at manufacturing and we can’t do so without a predictive maintenance solution. We tried to build this internally but were left with a mess of data and no easy way to take actions on it. I believe the future is highly personalized with AI at the center – I want my alerts to be based on my utilization, my equipment and my way of stressing my machine. Tractian is simply more agile at applying new technologies and they are far more collaborative in coming up with new ideas and implementing them”, said Luis Moncada, the Maintenance Manager of Johnson Controls – American heating, ventilation, and security equipment manufacturer.
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The CEO and founder of Tractian, Igor Marinelli, is the restless computer engineer behind the company and an alum of the University of California, Berkeley. As son of migrants and factory workers from Brazil and Italy, he draws inspiration from his diverse heritage. Growing up witnessing his father’s struggles as a maintenance technician ignited Igor’s passion for machines. This passion led him to work in the challenging world of the pulp and paper industries, where he encountered firsthand outdated solutions from established incumbents, prompting him to seek innovative ways to tackle asset maintenance challenges.
“I have a personal mission to elevate this category of workers in a highly impactful way. The Assisted Maintenance category will provide unimaginable support for maintenance professionals. By combining shop floor expertise with our technology, maintainers will be able to anticipate and address issues with unprecedented accuracy and speed,” says Marinelli.
“Introducing pivotal changes to maintenance operations is key to global resilience and we believe Tractian has an opportunity to build a global industrial intelligence platform in a market that is currently underserved,” said Trevor Oelschig, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “Tractian’s team demonstrates an incredible ability to iterate on products at a rapid pace. They do this by partnering closely with customers who strive to take availability, safety, and reliability to the next level as they modernize industrial asset management.”
“Tractian’s growth in the past 18 months has been off the charts, illustrating that enterprise maintenance teams across the world continue to eagerly look for technology that supercharges their capabilities,” said Debjit Mukerji, Partner at Next47. “The team’s relentless focus on customer delight and product innovation, including harnessing the latest in AI capabilities, leads the industry.”
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