UK-headquartered Zaptic, a frontline operations platform for manufacturing companies, has picked up $10 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by London VC Molten Ventures that recently backed Evonetix and Hadean, with participation from existing investors.
The funds will be used by Zaptic to continue its growth, expand into new markets and new verticals. In addition to this, the company will use the investment to develop its no-code platform that will help manufacturers bridge the existing skills gap and digitise daily operations in such a way that it closes the data loop and brings in the use of AI in factories.
With this round, the total investment raised by Zaptic accounts for $16 million. Also, Molten Ventures joins Zaptic’s board of directors as part of the investment. As a part of the partnership, Zaptic, and Molten Ventures will work together to scale the former’s solution to help 700 million industrial workers across global supply chains, to operate flawlessly.
“We are seeing huge demand from manufacturers looking for solutions to help them transform their operations in the face of increasing pressures and a worsening skills gap.” said Zaptic CEO, Richard Milnes. “This investment from Molten Ventures will allow us to scale our business to meet that demand and continue to invest deeply into creating an operational knowledge layer for workers, with operational data enabled by AI.”
“Zaptic is addressing one of the biggest challenges facing industrial companies today in a really smart way,” said Nelly Markova, Principal at Molten Ventures. “By digitising processes and making knowledge more accessible to frontline workers, Zaptic is helping manufacturers significantly improve productivity, reduce waste and better meet customer demands. We’re excited to support the team’s vision for transforming industrial workplaces.”
What challenge does Zaptic solve?
In a highly competitive market, manufacturers need to enable their workforce to flex across new equipment, processes, and products, with a heavy focus on the alignment of people and data. Workers need on-the-job assistance in knowing what to do, when to do it, and how best to do it at the point of use.
Zaptic was founded by Richard Milnes in 2012 in the UK to address this issue faced by manufacturers. The company’s vision is to be the operating system for frontline execution, with insight and best practices shared within and across companies, raising standards and improving workforce productivity across supply chains.
Currently, leading manufacturers such as Carlsberg, Hovis, Berry Global and Celgard, use Zaptic as part of their transformation activities, digitising operations for frontline teams and accelerating operational excellence journeys. The company is committed to providing a solution that will be used in line with Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) as outlined by the FDA.
Connected worker platform for frontline teams
It offers a connected worker platform providing job instruction and collaboration for frontline teams, and a no-code toolkit designed to accelerate the digital transformation of daily operations. It not only unlocks measurable improvements in productivity, quality and safety but also enables a smooth transfer of knowledge between the retiring and new generation of workers to improve market resiliency.
The no-code platform aligns human and machine reference data for context specificity, closing the loop intelligently between human activity and assets, for maximum machine learning insight and adaptation.
Its unique ‘no-code’ drag-and-drop functionality is claimed to ensure productivity, efficiency, and savings. It is claimed to help users save over 10% in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) improvement and reduce downtime by up to 20%.