Industrial IoT startup SwitchOn secures $1M funding led by pi Ventures
Industrial IoT startup SwitchOn has raised $1 million seed funding led by deep tech-focused early-stage venture capital fund pi Ventures. The round also saw participation from Axilor and The Chennai angels.
The company plans to use the funds raised to strengthen its edge-compute architecture, expand the team and improve its market adoption in India and other countries in the European Union and Asia Pacific region.
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, thereby ensuring better efficiency for the equipment as well as the plant.
The startup said that it has seen significant traction among industries like automotive and FMCG discrete manufacturing in India and Asia Pacific markets.
“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. We believe that our customers will benefit heavily from our expanded global footprint and deep technology differentiators” said Banerjee.
“What attracted us to invest in them was their clear understanding of technology and customer needs. Another winning point was their minimally intrusive solution, the need of the hour in the Industrial IoT space” said Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures.
Pi Ventures had announced the final close of its first fund at Rs 225 crore in September last year. The fund writes cheques between $500,000 and $1 million to startups and plans to invest in 18-20 startups in the health-tech, logistics, retail, fintech, and enterprise sectors over the next three-four years.
