Manufacturing data contextualization leader, Raven, announces completion of Series A financing.
Raven, a leading provider of data contextualization software for frontline operations, announced today the successful completion of its Series A funding round, completing $12 million USD ($16M CAD) equity financing. The round was led by Momenta Ventures and Chartline Capital Partners with participation from Celtic House Venture Partners and Export Development Canada as well as continued support from prominent angel investors.
Today’s macroeconomic forces including rising costs, increasing scarcity of skilled labor and supply chain disruptions are making it even more critical for manufacturers to improve efficiency. As a result, manufacturers are racing to adapt, accelerating reshoring efforts and spending on Industry 4.0 technologies expected to increase from $263B in 2021 to $1.1T by 2028 (MIT Sloan).
“Manufacturing is changing rapidly with the huge influx of high tech, Industry 4.0 solutions. But despite investments, manufacturers still struggle to improve operational efficiencies and generate returns because they don’t have sufficient knowledge of their problems to deploy advanced technology solutions. Raven’s automated contextualization software solves this problem and we are thrilled to partner with them to unlock global manufacturing capacity and profits,” said Michael Dolbec, Managing Director at Momenta.
“To address labor costs and mitigate supply chain issues, the majority of manufacturers have begun reshoring their productions. This will bring hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs back to Canada and the US to help boost our economies,” said Phil Stern, Managing Director at Chartline Capital Partners. “We believe Raven’s solution will play a key role in engaging these frontline teams to provide the critical context and shop floor insights needed for businesses to drive lean improvements and gains.”
The General Ledger for Time
With existing solutions, manufacturers are only able to account for up to 50% of lost time at best due to lack of buy-in and engagement from the frontline. Without understanding the root cause of inefficiencies, investments to drive improvements are deployed based on instinct rather than facts. This is why 86% of Industry 4.0 projects fail to deliver ROI (Capgemini).
Raven is the only solution that combines and analyzes operator input and machine data to provide a clear timeline of all production states and losses — with context for everything that’s happening on the line, 100% of the time. Leading manufacturers in the Discrete, Life Sciences and Food and Beverage industries are using Raven’s solution to empower frontline, engineering and management teams to make confident, fact-driven productivity improvements on the shop floor.
“Raven provides visibility we’d otherwise be guessing at,” said Justin Brennan, Director of Operational Excellence at Renaissance Lakewood.
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“Raven has completely revolutionized the tracking of our manufacturing facilities. The ease of use is unmatched,” said Tyler Bennett, Part Owner & VP of Manufacturing, Lester Buildings.
SMBs Are Now the Driving Force Behind Industry 4.0 Adoption
“Mid-size manufacturers are now the driving force behind mass adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies. Many of these companies have a people-first approach to digital transformation and see the value in empowering the frontline to be a part of their efforts to enhance data quality and drive sustainable improvements. Since SMBs make up 98% of all manufacturing companies, the opportunity for Raven is huge,” said Tom Valis, Partner at Celtic House Venture Partners.
Successful Industry 4.0 initiatives will give mid-size manufacturers a competitive edge over today’s large market leaders. With the resources and agility for change management, digitization is no longer an obstacle for SMBs.
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“At Raven, our mission is to accelerate the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, delivering better products to consumers, better profits to manufacturers and better and safer jobs for plant workers. We are thrilled to have the support of such reputable firms and notable angel investors. This funding will allow us to continue rapid expansion of our capabilities and advancing our mission,” said Martin Cloake, CEO at Raven. “With advancements in AI from companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and others, we are moving into an age of near-limitless computing and analytical power. But, ROI delivered from technology investments will increasingly depend on the quality of data – not the just quality of analysis. In manufacturing, obtaining the high quality data needed to drive real improvements depends on the ability to interpret and contextualize data from both people and machines. This is the value that Raven provides.”