Welcome back to the latest episode of The Future of Automotive on CBT News, where we put recent automotive and mobility news into the context of the broader themes impacting the industry.
I’m Steve Greenfield from Automotive Ventures, and I’m glad that you could join us.
This week, I’m excited to announce that Automotive Ventures portfolio company Axion Ray has raised a $17.5 million Series A funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Axion Ray is an AI-powered command center engineers use to swiftly identify, investigate, root cause, solve, and monitor issues that could lead to downtime, safety, warranty cost, and recalls.
This Series A funding round brings the company’s total funding to $25 million. With this investment, Axion Ray will further expand its AI capabilities within technical issue detection and scale its go-to-market effort to new industries.
Axion Ray’s founder and CEO Daniel First started the company with the goal of helping manufacturers solve their highest-priority emerging issues that affect customers, as early as possible.
On average, poor product quality costs manufacturers up to 10% of their annual revenue. Axion Ray’s AI platform attacks this pain point directly and is demonstrating impressive results. Leveraging Axion, customers have increased product quality while decreasing downtime by an average of 27% leading to improved customer experience and on average, a 16% reduction in warranty and service cost.
Axion’s expanding customer base boasts top-tier Fortune 500 manufacturers, including industry giants like Baxter, Cummins, Newell, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, DENSO, alongside a diverse array of manufacturers spanning the automotive, medical devices, and consumer products sectors.
Without Axion’s assistance, engineers must manually sift through extensive data, often incredibly messy, complex and fragmented. This manual process results in delayed issue detection, leading to prolonged downtime and potential safety incidents. Axion’s platform by contrast enables engineers to contextualize emerging issues within a broader spectrum of data, facilitating more efficient and effective problem-solving.
Our investment in Axion Ray strongly aligns with the Automotive Ventures Mobility Fund’s investment thesis. At the core of our fund’s philosophy lies a commitment to backing the next generation of transportation technology innovators, and Axion exemplifies this vision perfectly.
Axion’s targeted approach to addressing its customers’ genuine, validated needs at the convergence of AI, analytics, and workflow automation promises to revolutionize how manufacturers identify and resolve quality issues. With a clear trajectory towards dominating market share, coupled with strong pathways for an ultimate exit, this investment holds the promise of delivering exceptional returns for our investors.
We will continue to enthusiastically support Axion on their journey and are confident that our investment, combined with our input and connections, will not only generate substantial returns but also cement their position as a market leader ushering in the future of manufacturing.
You can find out more about Axion Ray by visiting their website at www.AxionRay.com.
Companies to Watch
Every week we highlight interesting companies in the automotive technology space to keep an eye on. If you read my weekly Intel Report, we showcase a company to watch, and take the opportunity here to share that company with you.
Glimpse
Glimpse is on a mission to make EV battery failures a thing of the past, by enabling battery quality at scale.
Glimpse has built the world’s most powerful battery quality monitoring platform.
Battery defects come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can reside in any part of the cell. In many instances, these types of defects are latent, which means that they are initially imperceptible to standard electrical characterization techniques.
By generating a high-resolution map of the cell’s internal structure, X-ray computed tomography (also known as a CT scan) makes it possible to produce a comprehensive assessment of a battery’s manufacturing quality.
Glimpse allows battery manufacturers and automakers to identify defects and implement fixes.
If you’d like to learn more about Glimpse, you can check them out at www.glimp.se.
So that’s it for this week’s Future of Automotive segment.
If you’re an AutoTech entrepreneur working on a solution that helps car dealerships, we want to hear from you. We are actively investing out of our new DealerFund.
If you’re interested in joining our Investment Club to make direct investments into AutoTech and Mobility startups, please join. There is no obligation to start seeing our deal flow, and we continue to have attractive investment deals available to our members.
Don’t forget to check out my book, The Future of Automotive Retail, which is available on Amazon.com. And keep an eye out for my new book, “The Future of Mobility”, which is almost done, and will be out early this year.
Thanks (as always) for your ongoing support and for tuning into CBT News for this week’s Future of Automotive segment. We’ll see you next week!
