Blackbird Ventures, Telstra Ventures and Skip Capital have invested $4.8 million in Brisbane-headquartered company Movus, a developer of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) sensor and machine monitoring solutions.
The investment will allow Movus to scale up to international markets, further refine its product, expand its research and development laboratory, and grow its Brisbane-based team, a statement by the company said.
Founded by Brad Parsons around two years ago out of the University of Queensland’s iLabs, Movus has developed and launched a cost-effective IIoT sensor and software-as-a-service (SaaS) monitoring platform, known as FitMachine–‘the Fitbit for machines’.
The platform uses Artificial Intelligence to help organisations proactively monitor, manage, and maintain the condition of their industrial machinery; providing compelling return on investment by reducing the need for manual inspections and turning unplanned outages into planned situations.
Known as Industry 4.0, the Predictive Maintenance market is expected to be a USD $5 billion (AUD$6.5 billion) industry by 2021. With its disruptive FitMachine technology and uniquely customer-focused business model, Movus is poised to rapidly capture share in this growing market.
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“This Series A funding is critical as we are poised to scale with many new customer deployments which allow us to accelerate growth globally and pass on the benefits to customers via more rapid delivery of improvements. We’ll also be growing our engineering team and are particularly interested in people with a passion for hardware design and machine learning,” said Parsons. “Our vision is to transform machines across their lifecycle to dramatically improve these industries for the benefit of the planet.”
“Industrial machinery is the engine room of our economy and the FitMachine plays a crucial role in ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. We’re proud to join the journey of Movus,” Rick Baker, Co-Founder of Blackbird Ventures said.
“Telstra is a national and global leader in IoT, with Australia’s largest IoT footprint that is already connecting more than two million IoT devices. We recently announced two new IoT technologies in our mobile network – Cat M1 and Narrowband, and in 2017 opened Australia’s first publicly-accessible Open IoT Lab in Melbourne,” said Matthew Koertge, Managing Director at Telstra Ventures.
“We believe that Movus aligns well with our broader IoT strategy, providing a compelling IoT value proposition for machinery owners and a unique opportunity to capture value in the ‘Industry 4.0’ market.”
More information on Movus can be found on this website www.movus.com.au.