Basetwo, a no-code artificial intelligence platform for manufacturers, today announced it has raised $3.8 million in seed funding to allow pharmaceutical process engineers to build digital twins of their manufacturing plants more rapidly in order to increase process development and efficiency.

The new funding round was led by Glasswing Ventures and Argon Ventures with additional funding from Caffeinated Capital, Graphite Ventures, MaRs IAF, Pareto Holdings, Plug and Play, and Quiet Capital.

This funding will support today’s launch of the Basetwo AI Platform, which allows engineers to rapidly digitize their manufacturing processes in order to simulate everything that might happen on the floor before putting it into operation.

A digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object or process in the real world. They’re used to simulate operational supply chain processes with computerized physics. This allows engineers to experiment with different processes before implementing them on manufacturing plant floors and have a fairly accurate idea of how they’ll work out.

In the case of pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment, much of the simulation involves chemical and biological processes that produce a lot of sensor data. Many of these processes already have pre-built models that Basetwo has already integrated into its AI platform that allows engineers to set up quickly.

Basetwo’s platform uses what is called “physics-informed machine learning” to allow it to ingest vast amounts of sensor data and integrate complex manufacturing processes. This allows the models to improve with more data gathered from real-world processes. In turn, this boosts Basetwo’s predictive capability.

Once all of Basetwo’s digital twins are set up and built on ingested data from data sources from a manufacturer’s data, Engineers can then use a no-code interface to quickly design new processes to experiment with. That means process engineers do not need to know any advanced coding languages in order to create simulations using Basetwo’s intuitive user interface that draws on the company’s AI, data capabilities and simulations.

In this manner, engineers can test new operations, optimize processes and visualize bottlenecks. All of that can be done without disrupting manufacturing operations.

“The introduction of our no-code AI platform lets manufacturers of any size leverage the power of the internet of things and machine learning to develop digital twins easily, quickly, and economically,” said Thouheed Abdul Gaffoor, co-founder and chief executive of Basetwo.

The pharmaceutical has been particularly affected by supply chain issues during the past two years due to the pandemic. Part of this has been due to an increased demand for drugs, but Basetwo claims that manufacturing optimization still hasn’t succeeded in meeting these demands.

A report from Research and Markets predicted that the global market for digital twins was estimated at $5.1 billion in 2020 and is predicted to reach $35.5 billion by 2026 driven primarily by the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Data analytics and digital transformation are at the forefront of the pharmaceutical industry as well, with a report from ABI Research forecasting digital factory revenue to reach $4.5 billion by 2030.

“The pharmaceutical manufacturing market is at a critical point, having been heavily challenged by the pandemic and supply chain issues,” said Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures. “By creating a digital duplicate of a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, the Basetwo AI platform allows process engineers to analyze where things might break down — or run more efficiently, and increase resilience.”

Photo: Basetwo