Pioneering New Category of Cloud-Powered FactoryOps To Enable Digital Transformation in Manufacturing
Manufacturing tech leader Guidewheel (formerly Safi) announced it has closed an $8M Series A funding round led by Greycroft. Greycroft was joined in the round by leading firms, angels, and Fortune 500 executives. The investment will continue to fuel Guidewheel’s growth as it pioneers a new category of cloud-powered FactoryOps, empowering all the world’s factories to digitize their operations and reach sustainable peak performance. The company is simultaneously updating its brand from Safi to Guidewheel to reinforce its strength as a tool to help guide teams to manufacturing excellence.
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“Guidewheel has built the real-time data platform we believe will help create the future of manufacturing,” said Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft. “It is an amazingly simple yet powerful platform that comes at a time when factory performance is so critical to survival for manufacturers and the supply chain overall.”
The investment brings Guidewheel closer to its vision of empowering all factories to reach sustainable peak performance. While the world’s biggest factories use complicated systems to optimize efficiency, small and midsize manufacturers often have a mix of different machine makes, models, and ages with information in silos that don’t connect. This leaves teams wrestling with manual data entry and putting out fires. Manufacturers typically lose more than 20 percent of production time as a result, at a cost of more than $3 trillion in waste each year.
What’s been missing is FactoryOps, a new category of technology that uses the power of the cloud to provide real-time visibility into problems and performance on the factory floor. FactoryOps brings any machine online, into a connected network that simply and cost-effectively gives every factory team the tools to reach manufacturing excellence.
“FactoryOps is now possible because the power of the cloud can democratize access to the tools once only available to elite manufacturers. And it couldn’t come at a more critical time,” said Guidewheel CEO and Co-Founder Lauren Dunford. “In an environment of increasing pressure and uncertainty, every manufacturer needs to get more out of the equipment they already have. Now, any factory can connect all of their machines to immediately identify and take actions to improve, and have all the tools to reach peak performance as a team. If all the world’s 10 million factories can reach maximum efficiency, the impact will be tremendous.”
Guidewheel’s plug-and-play FactoryOps platform is inspired by the simple, universal truth that every machine on the factory floor has a power cord. Guidewheel clips onto any machine to track its activity in real-time, and turns that “heartbeat” into a connected, actively-learning system that empowers teams to reduce lost production time, increase throughput, and get better and better over time. Teams can expand and progress at their own pace—the more they use Guidewheel, the more they get out of it.
“Guidewheel has been the missing link for us here to really get at lost production hours,” said Paul Kayser, CEO of Pretium Packaging. “The simplicity of Guidewheel’s implementation coupled with the real-time visibility into our actual production efficiencies has had an immediate and positive impact on our business goals—so much so that we have rapidly implemented it across our entire organization. It’s now a cornerstone of our operating philosophy at the machine cell, plant, and enterprise levels.”
Guidewheel has raised a total of $12M to date, with previous rounds from additional investors including LocalGlobe, Savannah Fund, and DEG, with public funds of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, among others.
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