BrightAI Inc., a startup helping companies more efficiently manage physical assets such as factory equipment, today announced that it has raised $15 million in seed funding.

The company was launched in 2019 by Chief Executive Officer Alex Hawkinson, who previously co-founded smart home software provider SmartThings. The latter firm became part of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. through a 2014 acquisition. Similarly to SmartThings, BrightAI provides a set of software tools designed to ease device management tasks, but it focuses on enterprise use cases rather than the consumer segment.

“SmartThings focused on connecting millions of homes, while BrightAI is focused on outside of homes, solving for our critical infrastructure that human civilization relies on, from the water we drink to the power we consume,” Hawkinson said. 

The core component of BrightAI’s product portfolio is a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform. It runs multimodal AI models that can process data from sensors deployed at industrial facilities, employee devices and other sources. The models analyze the collected information to help companies find ways of streamlining their day-to-day operations.

Detecting equipment failures is one of the tasks that BrightAI promises to ease with its platform. According to the company, its AI models can spot technical issues in systems such as industrial HVAC units before they’re noticed by customers. That allows technicians to start the troubleshooting process earlier and thereby reduce the malfunction’s impact on end-users.

BrightAI says that its platform also has uses in the manufacturing sector. According to the company, factory operators can collect data from the computers that coordinate their production equipment to find ways of boosting efficiency. Utilities, in turn, can leverage BrightAI’s software to more quickly analyze information gathered during infrastructure inspections. 

To help enterprises put its platform to use, the company sells a collection of complementary hardware products. BrightAI offers cameras, sensors and computing modules that it refers to as AI edge hubs. The latter devices provide up to 30 teraflops of processing capacity for powering machine learning applications. 

BrightAI says it has deployed more than 250,000 sensors to date for customers, while its edge AI hubs are running at thousands of locations. The company’s products have so far been adopted by six large enterprises in asset-heavy sectors such as the HVAC and utility segments. BrightAI reportedly generates more than $80 million in annual revenue from those customers. 

The seed round announced today will enable the company to enhance its product portfolio and acquire more customers. The capital was provided by Upfront Ventures.

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