OTee has raised €5.3 million in seed funding, led by North Ventures, with Atlas SGR and existing investors RunwayFBU, Superangels, and Antler also participating.
Based in Oslo, this industrial startup builds software for control systems. Co-founded by Henrik Pedersen, a former ABB executive, and Radek Janik, who met during the Antler cohort in 2022, the company offers an engineering platform for designing, deploying, and managing virtual control systems using open architecture and standards.
“Not much has really changed in industrial automation since the programmable logic controller, or PLC, was introduced. We’re changing that with a fully software-based approach, which our field calls software-defined infrastructure or software-defined automation. This lets customers use any hardware in their control systems,” Pedersen tells Tech Funding News.
OTee’s platform replaces PLC hardware with software-defined control running on open, off-the-shelf hardware. It also offers the same reliable, safety-critical performance, but removes vendor lock-in, lowers costs, and allows updates across many sites at once.
The global PLC market is expected to be worth $11.7 billion in 2025, with five companies, including Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, Mitsubishi Electric, and ABB, together holding 77% of the market share.
“Our main competitors are actually the established companies. We’re similar in core technology, but we stand out for our openness, including open integration and open infrastructure. Traditional companies still keep customers locked into their own systems,” Pedersen adds.
The company now has 21 employees from 13 different countries. “Like many niche tech firms, we still have more men than women, but we’re proud to have some talented women on our team too,” Pedersen said.
Across Europe, investors are investing in modernising industrial operations. As TFN reported earlier, Encentive raised €6.3 million for AI energy management, and Edmund secured €2.5 million to address factory knowledge loss as engineers retire. OTee works at a more basic level: before AI optimisation can happen, the control infrastructure needs to be open, reliable, and programmable.
The new funding will help OTee develop its products and expand internationally as it grows its virtual PLC platform in the energy, utilities, and manufacturing sectors.
