SwitchOn, an industrial technology startup, said on Monday that it has raised $1 million in a seed funding round led by piVentures, an Indian deep-tech focused venture capital fund.
Along with pi, Axilor Ventures – the seed fund set up by former Infosys executives SD Shibulal and Kris Gopalakrishnan – and angel investors from The Chennai Angels have also participated in the round.
Founded by Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee in 2017, SwitchOn helps manufacturing industries identify plant-level bottlenecks and improve equipment efficiency. Industries can create digital twins of their heavy assets, monitor and predict availability and performance bottlenecks in advance, thus ensuring better efficiency for the equipment as well as the plant.
Aniruddha Banerjee, co-founder, SwitchOn, said, “SwitchOn is leveraging deep expertise in hardware and software design to create state-of-the-art edge solutions for increasing transparency, reducing turn-around, and improving quality on the shop-floor of manufacturing industries to ultimately achieve operational excellence”.
Manish Singhal, founding partner, pi Ventures, added, “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”.
piVentures is currently investing from its ₹225 crore first fund, which it raised last year. Its limited partners, or investors include Hero Enterprise chairman Sunil Kant Munjal, Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures) and the corporate financing arm of Hero Electronix, besides other high net-worth investors and CDC Group, the UK government’s development finance institution.
The fund plans to invest in 18-20 deep-tech startups, and keep aside a significant portion for follow-on investments. It will invest across health-tech, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors. Its portfolio includes AI-based health startup SigTuple and AI-based logistics firm Locus, among others.
Source: Mint