London-based software as a service (SaaS) company, Ai Build, announced that it has raised $3.2 million from its most recent round of funding. Along with SuperSeed, one of the company’s existing investors, the funding round was led by new investor ACT Venture Partners, an international venture capital fund based in Turkey.
Ai Build’s AiSync software is designed for large-scale additive manufacturing (AM), and the company places a special emphasis on the software’s compatibility with robotic arm pellet extrusion systems. As such, Ai Build’s main customers are in industries like automotive and aerospace, including Rolls-Royce and Boeing, which also gave the company funding last year via the ATI Boeing Accelerator.
In a press release, Daghan Cam, Ai Build’s co-founder and CEO, said, “Since our product launch last year we onboarded over 20 hardware partners on AiSync as well as a customer base that is growing on a daily basis including several Fortune 500 manufacturers. The new investment will allow us to scale our teams across the board to continue onboarding new partners and customers rapidly.” Nichola Bates, Head of Global Accelerators and Innovation Programs at Boeing, added, “We are excited to support Ai Build on their journey towards enabling sustainable factories of the future. Combination of a unique, AI-powered software platform and a world class team of experts in their fields makes Ai Build a company that we can trust to accelerate our transition into a more sustainable aerospace industry.”
In addition to its versatile ability to work with a variety of different technologies across a range of widely-used hardware systems, AiSync’s main selling point is that it’s easy to use. Rather than manual coding, the platform relies on visual programming. This is more or less the idea with all workflow management platforms, which are going to be especially vital over the next decade to the success of new technologies like AM. For the foreseeable future, the industry is going to continue to depend on workers who have little or no experience with AM in order to add to its labor pool. It’s hard to envision this happening without some significant simplification to the user experience of operating AM-based production systems.
Another advantage that Ai Build has is its relative longevity compared to other AM software startups. Although its having been founded in 2015 still makes it a fairly new company, the fact that it has been growing and more importantly learning along with the industry itself gives it an enormous leg-up on companies started in the last couple years. As such, the company is also poised to continue growing as soon as the industry starts operating on a new, larger scale. Software startups that don’t fail often end up getting acquired, but Ai Build is one that could remain as a standalone entity.
Images courtesy of Ai Build