Sep 19, 2019   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Plutoshift Secures Series A Funding to Introduce Process Performance Monitoring to Manufacturing

Plutoshift, the leader in data intelligence for industrial processes, today announced it has secured an $8 million Series A round from proven institutional and individual investors.

Plutoshift has developed a specialized view of process performance for industrial companies, offering a unified window into manufacturing operations through highly sophisticated software that leverages Artificial Intelligence to drive proactive insights.

The company is initially focusing its platform on manufacturers with a critical reliance on water in their processes. Plutoshift has termed it ‘Business Water’.

The new investment will be used to expand the technology behind Plutoshift’s cloud-based solution, which is designed for teams to track, predict, and communicate decisions and the efficiency of critical physical assets and processes used in manufacturing.

By unlocking insights from existing data sources in real-time, Plutoshift enables industrial companies to have a holistic view of key cost drivers and resources that impact their business. This approach allows operators and managers inside manufacturing businesses to stay better informed and take proactive action.

“Business Water, the use of critical resources to manage water in industrial applications, is quickly becoming one of the biggest challenges in manufacturing,” said Prateek Joshi, founder and CEO of Plutoshift.

Through a framework called ‘Grounded AI,’ Plutoshift is bringing the power of performance monitoring to the physical world by driving practical use cases in the industrial sector. Grounded AI is a more focused and industry-specific approach to implementing Artificial Intelligence, enhancing existing data systems, unlocking its value, and surfacing valuable information to make the data immediately actionable.

“We are focused on applying both Artificial Intelligence and industry expertise in tackling this problem, doing it in a practical and focused way. We call that ‘Grounded AI’,” continued Joshi.

For example, Plutoshift is working with a large beverage company to help it proactively monitor process performance around water treatment. Operators at the company’s production facility need to continuously track parameters such as energy consumption, water recovery and membrane cleaning. The data related to these processes (e.g. operational, financial, maintenance) is spread across multiple systems, negatively impacting the cost of running the water treatment system and manual monitoring consumes excessive resources, unduly stressing budgets.

With Plutoshift, the performance metrics are computed in real-time and the operators have a unified and contemporaneous view of the systems, as well as near-term predictive analysis. Plutoshift enables operators to foresee spikes or anomalies in resource consumption, allowing them to take preemptive actions and reduce costs.

The investor group in the round reflect this combination of digital and analog realms and includes Fall Line Capital and Unshackled Ventures, previous investors in Plutoshift.

A group of new investors are also participating in the Series A round. This group represents notable entrepreneurs in manufactured products and astute angel investors: Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, Joey Zwillinger, co-founder of Allbirds, and Nat Turner, co-founder of Flatiron Health.

“Process Performance Monitoring represents a huge market opportunity,” said Eric O’Brien, co-founder and managing director at Fall Line Capital. “If we can solve the business water problems for manufacturing companies, we can then expand the solution to monitor many other processes within these verticals.”

Plutoshift was founded in 2016 by Joshi with the vision of connecting the constantly changing realities of the physical world with the monitoring power of intelligent software. This effort resulted in helping industrial operators harness the power of existing plant data related to operations, finances, and maintenance spread across different systems. By providing a fundamentally different way of looking at processes that drive their businesses, Plutoshift aims to provide an unprecedented level of information access to operators and managers.

Joshi is an Artificial Intelligence researcher, an author of 9 books, and a TEDx speaker. He has been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30, CNBC, TechCrunch, Silicon Valley Business Journal, and many more publications. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master's degree specializing in Artificial Intelligence. He has previously worked at NVIDIA and Microsoft Research.

About Plutoshift

Plutoshift is the leader in data intelligence for industrial processes. Their cloud-based solution offers real-time tracking of process metrics and proactive management of resources for manufacturing businesses. Plutoshift’s Grounded AI technology transforms passive legacy monitoring systems to active performance monitoring in industries like water, food, beverage, brewing, chemicals, and energy. This enables operators to automatically monitor critical processes and have access to actionable information in real-time. Plutoshift has offices in Palo Alto and Denver.