Amper (HAX 09) announced today an $11M Series A led by Lewis & Clark Ventures, with participation from Foundation Capital, Corazon Capital, Slow Ventures, SOSV’s HAX, Converge VC, and GTMfund. This funding will support scaling the team from 20 to more than 50 employees, and will allow Amper to expand its already commercialized products and R&D new ones.
Amper retrofits existing machinery in factories with simple plug-and-play sensors that monitor information like down time, utilization rate, and output. Information is stored in a dashboard, giving easy access to manufacturers on the state of their production lines. While the insights Amper collects may not be as in-depth as those from new machines with built-in sensing, it does provide an easy, low-cost way to digitize existing factory systems without replacing the systems themselves.
“We ship out this DTC box,” co-founder and CEO Akshat Thirani told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of a DTC, self-installed kit. It takes about 10 minutes to install on any type of machine. That’s been our growth engine. We just give it away, folks can try it for free and take the product for a spin. After that initial product-fit stage, we’ve been exclusively doing remote sales.”