‘Industrial Copilot’ Tractian Raises Another $120 Million

Atlanta-based manufacturing solutions provider Tractian Technologies Inc., which combines integrated hardware, software and AI to modernize manufacturing maintenance activities, announced the completion of its latest funding round today. Led By Sapphire Ventures, the $120 million Series C raise brings the company’s total funding to $200 million from investors including General Catalyst, Next47, NGP Capital and Y Combinator. Founded in 2019, Tractian now has 400 employees, with teams in the United States, Mexico and Brazil, and has over 100,000 sensors in the field in more than 1,000 factories across its 500 customers, including Bosch, Kraft Heinz, Carrier, and Hyundai.

The company is on a mission to deliver on the long-promised industrial nirvana of truly predictive and preventive maintenance. While those tools have been around for decades, they have long been the province of highly skilled and trained practitioners using specialized tools and programs. Tractian wants to democratize those efforts, using technology to decrease the knowledge gap, and shift the narrative from industrial assets being cost centers to being revenue generators.

To deliver on that mission, the company invests heavily in R&D, with 50% of its current headcount being focused there. One specific area they invest in is their hardware. Tractian’s Smart Trac Ultra sensors monitor machine vibration, run time and RPM for changes that might indicate an impending equipment failure. “Just this year we filed like 12 patents, and next year we’re going to going to file for 30 more patents only related to our hardware innovation,” said Igor Marinelli, Tractian’s founder and CEO. “One of our hardware innovations when it comes to condition monitoring is being able to always be listening to the machine. So if you think about the paradigm until now, if you don’t have a cabled sensor, all the other condition monitoring sensors are like, wake up… sample… sleep. Wake up… sample… sleep. Our sensor’s always listening for any variation. So that’s one of our patents… that’s very important. A pulp and paper plant [engineer] might say, look… I don’t care. But for automotive customers, it’s a must.”

With its software, Tractian focuses on making actionable the data it gets from various plant sources, including its sensors and the customers’ other programs such as ERPs. The company’s software contains algorithmic models that compare over 400,000 assets around the world to help identify when a failure is imminent.

The AI component allows the software to help bridge the knowledge gaps, whether it’s by providing an operator with basic next-step instructions in case of a breakdown, or by assisting more advanced maintenance departments with end-to-end planning, future recommendations, and generation of complete procedures and checklists for inspections.

“When I talk about our product and why I like our thesis, it comes down to a couple of these core commitments, and one of them is, how can we build an experience that drives value for this super mature company that has an expert, power-user type experience within our platform?” explained Canyon Dell’Omo, product manager at Tractian. “But then, how do we also say, ‘Okay, let’s make sure that this works for one guy who’s wearing 1,000 hats right now and just needs to attack his low-hanging fruit?’ And as that matures, maybe in a couple years, that’s five guys there, and they have a more formal reliability program. We can work alongside them as a partner as they grow into our platform.”

Tractian’s technology offers other advantages to its customers. “They primarily utilize cellular communication for their data transmission, which was very key for us being near a military base,” said Gautam Sane, senior reliability engineer at CP Kelco, a food ingredients company. “It just fit in a lot more seamlessly to use something that’s based on cellular communication. And then, as far as the application itself or the actual analytics, they have a lot of great features that we are taking advantage of, like they have really good prescriptive insights that really provide, essentially the failure modes, in layman’s terms, for our maintenance department.”

Another food ingredient company, Ingredion Incorporated, has mature usage of Tractian’s technologies in its South American facilities, but is still in startup mode in the U.S. The early indications here are promising. “The first 40 or so sensors we put on, we got initial health reports and even some, what they call insights, which is notifications of some equipment issue,” said reliability engineer Jacob Hoffine. “We got those within the first two weeks. There were some that I would say, if not for having the sensor, we would have never noticed… For example, a lubrication problem, we could go out and lubricate it and recheck it on the Tractian platform and see that it fixed the problem… It was pretty impressive for that, the results we got early on.”

Tractian has built an impressive base of installed technology among a large number of customers for a company its age. But there is no resting on laurels here.

“We’re here to be a major industry player over the next decade and more,” said Dell’Omo. “So that’s the time investment that’s required. We’re more than happy to do that… I am just so enthralled by how mission driven we are and how every little thing is worth going the extra mile to make sure we accomplish what we want to accomplish.”