Published on the 10/04/2018 | Written by Jonathan Cotton
Movus has secured almost $5 million in Series A funding for its sensor-equipped, machine-learning tech…
Led by Blackbird Ventures, as well as Telstra Ventures and Skip Capital (Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s private investment fund), the Series A funding round has closed at $4.8 million. The Brisbane-based Movus – producers of internet-of-things solutions for industrial applications – will use the funds to scale up to international markets, refine the product, expand its R&D capabilities and hire new staff.
Founded in 2015, the company’s claim to fame is the FitMachine, a low-cost industrial IoT sensor tech married to a SaaS monitoring system, which allows manufacturers to monitor the condition of machinery, reducing the need for manual inspections and “turning unplanned outages into planned situations”.
Brad Parsons, CEO and founder of Movus says the investment will allow the company to accelerate growth globally and deliver improvements to the product at pace.
“Our vision is to transform machines across their lifecycle to dramatically improve these industries for the benefit of the planet,” says Parsons. “This Series A funding is critical as we are poised to scale with many new customer deployments which allow us to accelerate growth globally and pass on the benefits to customers via more rapid delivery of improvements,” he says.
“Our vision is to transform machines across their lifecycle to dramatically improve these industries for the benefit of the planet.”
With applications in mining, oil and gas, manufacturing and agriculture, and building and facilities management sectors, the company is looking to capture share in the ‘Industry 4.0’ market, specifically, the ‘predictive maintenance’ sector, estimated to hit US$5 billion by 2021.
Industry 4.0, defined as the intersection of physical systems, IoT cloud computing and cognitive computing, particularly in regard to manufacturing, is a rapidly developing market. McKinsey estimates that the market’s enabling technology, IoT, could be worth as much as US$11.1 trillion per year in 2025 with PwC’s 2016 Global Industry 4.0 Survey of industrial companies finding industrial sectors planning to commit US$907 billion per annum to Industry 4.0.
“Investment plans are extremely ambitious, with first movers in particular already making significant Industry 4.0 investments and realising both above-average digital revenues and operational savings,” says the report, Industry 4.0: Building the digital enterprise. “Their plans for the next five years are even more ambitious and far-reaching, with digital products and services paving the way for disruptive business models.”
“All told, our survey respondents expect to see US$421 billion in cost reductions and US$493 billion in increased annual revenues p.a. for the next five years. If even half of these expectations are met, Industry 4.0 will fundamentally reshape the competitive landscape and bring fundamental change to established industries.”
