RealWear Acquires Genba AI, Marking Realwear’s Shift to Becoming a Platform-First Business, Adds to Series C Funding By $1.5 Million

RealWear, the world’s leading provider of assisted reality solutions for frontline industrial workers, acquired Genba AI and received $1.5 Million of additional investment from Fortive Corporation. The move opens new industrial channels for RealWear to serve the industrial manufacturing maintenance market with cutting-edge voice-enabled software that captures critical knowledge for maintenance technicians and supervisors and, along with the current RealWear partner ecosystem, helps drive its assisted intelligence vision further, including the delivery of contextual data, tools, software and metrics to aid frontline operations and IT.

“In last week’s funding announcement, we mentioned more game-changing human-centric tech to come,” said Rama Oruganti, Chief Product Officer, RealWear. “Today we’re bringing our first ever SaaS offering to market for the frontline, helping to move us toward a fully platform-centric business. Helping customers easily capture data and surface insights through contextual tools provided by RealWear and partners increases worker productivity and our customers’ bottom line.”

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The work of a typical industrial maintenance technician covers a wide range of activities including creating and completing work orders, capturing notes, logging parts and charging for labor, all of which must be stored in the business’s CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System).

CMMSs are not, however, designed to facilitate frontline workflows, which can result in incomplete data and additional unplanned downtime if not paired with a solution such as what Genba offers. According to Genba, today’s Industrial Maintenance Technicians spend 30 minutes each shift completing paperwork yet self-report that up to 75% of urgent issues, and even less critical tribal knowledge, goes unreported.

Using Genba’s specially trained speech-to-text technology, the company solves the key pain point for those techs required to enter data once a task is complete or as a shift ends. Genba’s customers are seeing critical data and knowledge capture increase up to three-fold, some within a week of installation, improving overall lifetime and uptime of an asset.

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Seattle-based Genba was co-founded by two former Fluke (a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortive) employees in March 2021 and was backed by a partnership Fortive formed with Pioneer Square Labs (PSL) as part of its overall innovation efforts that grows and nurtures early-stage companies.

“As part of this announcement we are thrilled with the level of talent we’re gaining at RealWear,” continued Oruganti. “The Genba team consists of Tier 1 expertise in the speech, NLP, and industrial workflow spaces. We’re very excited to be working with Fluke on a co-selling program to market the Genba solutions to Fluke’s eMaint industrial customers.”

Genba’s first two products to market are an intelligent, voice-enabled workflow mobile application for Industrial Maintenance Technicians and Industrial Maintenance Analytics for Maintenance Managers, both of which are fully integrated into Fluke’s CMMS product, eMaint.

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