Augury
Canvas Category Software : Information Technology : Asset Performance Management
We help eliminate downtime, reduce maintenance costs and maximize productivity for critical machines in industrial and commercial applications ranging from bottling and food processing to paper products and pharmaceuticals. Our Machine Health solutions combine advanced sensors with powerful AI capabilities and collaboration tools to help teams understand when machines are at risk. And we provide the expertise so customers know what to do to prevent failures long before those risks can threaten production or productivity.
Assembly Line
How factories are deploying AI on production lines
Augury’s sensors used in PepsiCo factories have been trained on huge volumes of audio data, to be able to detect faults such as wearing on conveyor belts and bearings, while analysing machine vibrations. By also collecting information and insights into equipment health on the whole, such as identifying when a machine might fail again in future, the technology lets workers schedule maintenance in advance, and avoid having to react to machine errors as they occur.
Prof Brintrup, professor of digital manufacturing at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, leads the Institute for Manufacturing’s Supply Chain AI Lab, which has developed its own predictive mechanism to identify where ingredients such as palm oil may have been used in a product, but disguised under a different name on its label. The lab’s recent research suggested that palm oil can go by 200 different names in the US - and these might not stand out to eco-conscious consumers.
🧼 Colgate-Palmolive: Successfully Scaling Technology Worldwide
Colgate-Palmolive’s secret to successfully scaling manufacturing technologies is simple. Don’t have any secrets. Almost a dozen technology pilots currently run on the Colgate side of the company with the results shared freely to anyone in Pruitt’s community of practice. When everyone knows what everyone else is doing, with no secrets about which pilots take place and their results, it’s easy to get plant managers excited and lined up to scale the technologies.
Centrally led discoveries include the Augury predictive maintenance system. Pruitt and his colleague Gary Binstock discovered Augury at the American Manufacturing Summit in Chicago. The wireless predictive maintenance system uses IoT sensors to monitor machine vibration and detect mechanical problems by comparing that information to a database of vibration data gathered from identical machines at other locations.
Or take, for another example, Colgate-Palmolive’s digital twin system, developed in partnership with the software company Twin Thread. Colgate-Palmolive wanted a system that would automatically adjust production parameters based on quality assessment data. After an 18-month development process, Colgate-Palmolive piloted the IIoT-based digital twin at a Hills Pet Nutrition plant in India.
When Pruitt and his team rolled out in North America the Augmentir system that digitizes standard operating procedures (SOPs), work instructions and checklists for operators to review on mobile devices, engineers from plants in India and Vietnam saw the successful deployments in North America and scaled Augmentir to their own plants.
The Role of Industrial AI in Chemical Manufacturing Digitization
In order for chemical manufacturers to optimize production lines, they need to address different process inefficiencies, such as the formation of undesired side products, process instabilities, losses due to impurities and more, on an ongoing basis. Given the complexities of chemical manufacturing, it’s extremely time-consuming and difficult to understand the root causes for these process inefficiencies, let alone anticipate when they are going to happen. Often times, it is the specific behavior of the combination of multiple production parameters, or tags, that cause the inefficiency to happen.
Why Overall Line Efficiency Is A Necessary Metric For Industry 4.0
While still an essential metric for manufacturers, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is limited in its ability to take in the ‘big picture’. Now, AI can be applied to also measuring Overall Line Efficiency (OLE) for a fuller view of the whole manufacturing process – backed by actionable insights. Ideally, a complete performance evaluation approach will incorporate both OEE and OLE methods with appropriate modifications to suit the operation.
DuPont + Augury: Driving Innovation with Predictive Maintenance
Predictive-Maintenance Tech Is Taking Off as Manufacturers Seek More Efficiency
Anna Farberov, general manager of PepsiCo Labs, the technology venture arm of PepsiCo Inc., said that over the past year so-called predictive-maintenance systems at four Frito-Lay plants reduced unexpected breakdowns, interruptions and incremental costs for replacement parts, among other benefits.
Developed by New York-based startup Augury Inc., the technology has helped Frito-Lay add some 4,000 hours a year of manufacturing capacity—the equivalent of several million pounds of snacks coming off the production line and shipped to store shelves, Ms. Farberov said.
Augury Acquires Process-Based AI Company Seebo, Targets $1 Trillion in Untapped Capacity for Manufacturers and Industry
Augury, the leading provider of IoT and Industrial AI solutions that improve health and reliability of machines for manufacturing and industry, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Seebo, a leader in AI-based process intelligence. The deal is a combination of cash and stock and is valued between $100 million and $200 million. Together the companies will provide a never-before possible, AI-driven view into the interplays between the diverse factors that influence overall production health. These correlated insights will enable customers to take actions that improve asset performance, process optimization, quality, sustainability and safety.
Common challenges to machine health and ways to overcome them
"It’s time to fully embrace the Imagination Age. Creativity is now the real driver of economic growth."@augurysys charts the fascinating history of manufacturing from Dutch Windmills to the Imagination Age#Industry40 #manufacturinghttps://t.co/rqxQ7ANPfn
— David Rogers (@doclrogers) January 20, 2022
Augury Raises $180M To Become One of the First Industry 4.0 Unicorns
The new investment and valuation is a validation of the emerging Machine Health category, of which Augury is the pioneer and leader. Machine Health uses the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence to predict and prevent industrial machine failures and improve machine performance. Machine Health allows manufacturers to reduce downtime, increase production capacity and productivity, optimize the cost of industrial asset care and accelerate their digital transformation.
Augury’s customers include some of the world’s top manufacturers, including Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo, Hershey’s, ICL and Roseburg. The company’s Machine Health solutions deliver an ROI of 3x-10x for customers, with programs paying for themselves within months.
Augury Becomes a Unicorn But Machine Health is Just Getting Started
Augury went into overdrive in 2021. Our revenue grew 150% and our team doubled as we made our 100-millionth machine recording. We saved one customer a million pounds of snacks and another 2.8 million tubes of toothpaste. We are helping our customers make medicines, produce clean water, and deliver so many products that make our life better, from diapers to construction materials, snack foods to vaccines. With this new funding we can continue to expand globally, innovate in Augury’s core manufacturing market and step into new ones.
Colgate-Palmolive Focuses on Machine Health to Improve Supply Chain Operations
Colgate-Palmolive is feeding this wireless sensor data into Augury’s machine health software platform. Pruitt pointed out that this enables Colgate-Palmolive’s machine data to be compared with machine data from more than 80,000 other machines connected to the Augury platform around the world.
“That massive analytical scale brings us insights on how to optimize the performance of equipment and make ever-smarter choices on how and where we deploy it,” Pruitt said. “What’s possible only gets more compelling as this AI solution harnesses more data to create better health outcomes for our machines and our business.”
Providing a specific example of how Augury’s Machine Health system has helped Colgate-Palmolive, Pruitt noted that the system’s AI detected rising temperatures in the drive of a tube maker and alerted the plant team. “Upon inspection, they discovered a problem with the motor’s water cooling system,” he said. “By getting it quickly resolved, we prevented the drive from failing due to overheating, which would’ve stopped the tube production line and incurred replacement costs. We figure the savings at 192 hours of downtime and an output of 2.8 million tubes of toothpaste, plus $12,000 for a new motor and $27,000 in variable conversion costs.”
Augury Raises $55 Million Series D Funding to Sustain Rapid Growth, Announces New Global Partnerships and Capabilities
The company also announced new partnerships and capabilities to help its global customers gain the benefit of prescriptive diagnostics and machine insights, no matter where in the world they operate. These include:
- Building a network of delivery partners to supplement Augury- and Customer-led installations, including ProPap in Germany, Caverion in Finland and Pluriservice in Italy, Fuse IoT to cover Latin and South America, and 42 North Solutions who provides additional coverage for North America;
- Expanding language support for the Augury platform, both for the platform itself and the key alerts that customers receive;
- Broadening the range of country-specific certifications to enable deployment of Machine Health in more geographies than ever before.
Augury Secures $25M Series C to Grow Impact on Machine Health, Completes Acquisition of Alluvium
“As the market continues to evolve rapidly on its journey to digital transformation, more enterprises seek to uncover blind spots in their operations with AI-based machine health solutions,” said Saar Yoskovitz, Co-Founder and CEO, Augury. “Over the course of the last year, we have made substantial gains in the market and look forward to deepening our partnerships in the year ahead. With this funding, we will continue to innovate and support our partners on a global scale.”
News of the financing round comes in tandem with the company’s completed acquisition of Alluvium – a startup whose computing platform provides simple, real-time machine insights to support safe, stable, and efficient industrial operations. Through Alluvium, Augury becomes the first industrial analytics company to provide both mechanical and operational insights on a unified platform to provide a holistic view of an operation. Not only does this acquisition enhance Augury’s analytics capabilities, but also incorporates Alluvium’s team to Augury to further drive innovation.
Augury Secures $17 Million Series B Funding Round to Power the Future of IIoT
“We are building a long-lasting company with the goal of diagnosing everything that has moving parts, effectively creating the mechanical nervous system of the IIoT,” said Saar Yoskovitz, CEO of Augury. “Equipment manufacturers and other market leaders in the industrial sector are increasingly turning to PdM as a critical component for their IIoT strategy. This funding will enable Augury to become a driving force towards the connected era of tomorrow.”
Hardware Startup Augury Nails $7 Million Series A Round
The company, with offices in New York and Haifa, Israel, makes a small device that can be used by maintenance personnel. A technician places the device on a machine, such as a chiller or pump, connecting the two via a magnet. The device, which contains ultrasonic sensors, records the vibrations and other sounds the equipment makes. It then sends the information to Augury’s servers that analyze it and spit back a diagnosis, such as that the machine needs more oil or a bearing replacement, to a smartphone app.
Augury will have to persuade customers that it is worth investing in its service that helps identify problems early. It is unclear how willing they would be. The poor state of infrastructure overall in the U.S. speaks to the low levels of willingness, in general, by society in investing in preventive maintenance.
Here we go
After two years of bootstrapping, we’ve decided it’s time to ramp up our team and start running. When we first started working on Augury, we wanted to prove the technology works and to validate that there is a real business opportunity for Augury before bringing in outside investors. This decision gave us complete freedom to navigate the Customer Development waters, set up experiments, fail fast and change directions. Towards the end of last year, we felt like we’d achieved problem/solution fit and proven our technology – so we hit the road.