AVIAN, a Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone facilities, has announced a $2.6 million pre-seed round, led by Founderful.
After two profitable bootstrapped years, the Zurich-based industrial AI company will accelerate deployment of its end-to-end thermal monitoring platform across sawmills, recycling, mining, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime operations – categories where fire and downtime risk are increasingly outpacing what insurers are willing to cover.
Industrial operators across Europe and North America are facing challenges, including fine dust, friction, electrical faults, and ageing equipment, which are pushing fire and downtime risk into territory that insurers will no longer underwrite at viable premiums. Sites that were insurable five years ago are being deemed too risky today.
AVIAN continuously monitors critical industrial equipment with thermal cameras, learning normal operating temperatures, and detecting early heat anomalies (thermal drift) to trigger smart, targeted alerts before failures or fire occur. It also generates automated predictive maintenance reports and backs the platform with 24/7 human support.
“Every alarm event is reviewed and fed back into the models, so detection keeps improving across the fleet and each new site benefits from what AVIAN has already learned in the field,” it said in a statement.
Over the last two years, AVIAN has prevented $50 million in damages from fires and equipment failures and is deployed in approximately 50 sites across 9 countries, including Germany and Switzerland.
“AVIAN has developed a solution to a problem which probably affects everyone in the industry directly. For us, it is a great partnership as it helps us make our operations much safer and improves the monitoring process. You will never be able to reduce the risk of fires to zero, but you can do everything you can to minimise the danger as much as possible – and AVIAN makes that possible simply and straightforwardly,” said Mr Ernest Schilliger, CEO of Schilliger Holz.
On his part, Mr Drew Hanover, Co-Founder and CTO of AVIAN, said, “We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are. We spent zero minutes on a deck.”
The company was founded after one of Switzerland’s largest sawmills saw Mr Hanover’s robotics and AI research in the Swiss media and reached out about escalating fires, downtime, and rising insurance pressure. It currently has a 10-person team based in Zurich.
Mr Alex Stöckl, Partner at Founderful, added: “Within a year of incorporation, the team at AVIAN already served dozens of manufacturing businesses in the US and Europe, preventing real fire incidents daily. With their thermal-vision technology, there’s an immediate ROI and a new industrial intelligence layer that unlocks further use cases and value for customers over time – backing them to accelerate their go-to-market and product roadmap was a no-brainer.”
SEE Full Details ➜