PRESS RELEASE:
Alchemy IoT, a provider of IoT Asset Intelligence for industrial applications, has launched with $4 million seed funding from Aweida Venture Partners and several angel investors. The startup’s cloud-based application, Clarity (https://alchemyiot.com/clarity/), helps customers achieve a greater return on their industrial assets and competitive advantage. The product introduces a novel “no-code” approach to IoT Asset Intelligence that simplifies how fleet management, plant maintenance and manufacturing performance can be improved using artificial intelligence and unsupervised machine learning.
Alchemy will focus on helping small- to mid-sized industrial customers overcome the technical and data-science resource mandates that are needed – and often unattainable – to deploy today’s expensive and highly complex IoT solutions.
“The promise of artificial intelligence, machine learning and industrial IoT are very real, but so too are the challenges smaller organizations face when trying to adopt and gain value from these new technologies,” said Victor Perez, CEO for Alchemy IoT. “Our mission is to make AI-powered IoT a ‘no-code’ proposition, one that any industrial company can quickly start and put to use to gain fast value. Too many of today’s IoT solutions require a massive budget and an extraordinary amount of customization to even getting started – we aim to disrupt and change that.”
Led by technology industry veterans from IBM, ABB, GE, StorageTek, Seagate and Sony Electronics, Alchemy defines its industry approach as “IoT Asset Intelligence,” an AI-based method to quickly gain knowledge and ROI from industrial assets. Supporting Industry 4.0 and digital transformations, this cloud-based approach eliminates the complexity and expense of Big Data and IoT initiatives by shifting the value stream to the asset itself. It aims to standardize workflows and enable no-code IoT adoption to preemptively solve problems and discover new business opportunities.
Through AI innovation, Alchemy aims to make “data science” available to small- to mid-market industrial customers by delivering a contextual view of operational and performance data – fast, and at a fraction of the cost of expensive, heavyweight, customized solutions. Its Clarity application creates a digital twin of industrial assets, allowing the full benefit of the internet to make industrial assets and data feeds easy to connect to its IoT cloud application.
Using Clarity, teams can visualize asset information in graphical dashboards, analyze asset performance through unsupervised machine learning, and take proactive action to increase the productivity of industrial fleets and machinery. Clarity stands alone in its ability to deliver self-learning, predictive analytics to automate complex tasks typically performed by high-cost and scarce data scientists. Offering asset data analytics through a low-cost SaaS model also enables customers to quickly deploy and scale thousands of devices within 48 hours of using Alchemy’s unique auto-provisioning capabilities.
“There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence and IoT will transform how companies operate and win in the industrial IoT market, and Alchemy has proven that it can make these technologies accessible smartly and practically,” said Jesse Aweida, general manager of Aweida Venture Partners. “I am very excited to support the Alchemy team as it moves to simplify and speed time-to-value for industrial IoT through its ‘no-code’ and application-specific approach that perfectly aligns with Industry 4.0 mega-trend approaches.”
Clarity’s capabilities streamline the industrial IoT user experience to simplify how data is viewed and analyzed to track maintenance activities, monitor alerts and receive critical feedback on asset performance.
Core features of the application include:
Sensor Data Monitoring: easily aggregates and filters data related to the health, operations and performance of connected industrial assets to deliver real-time data, including mobile assets tracked via GPS.
AI-based Analytics: unsupervised machine learning and Alchemy’s proprietary Self-Learning Maintenance Algorithm (SeLMA) makes each connected asset more intelligent about its operations to provide predictive, useful and actionable insights.
Notifications and Alerts: detected operational anomalies and predictive maintenance alerts are instantly delivered to designated team members via web browsers, email or within the application.
Mobile-enabled: mobile devices are enabled and connected with Clarity to extend the application to team members where and when they need important information or alerts.
Customized Dashboards: custom views are easily created to provide visibility and context into asset performance with Clarity’s simple “drag-and-drop” widgets.
Custom Events and Actions: automatic updates to workflow and tasks, and remote equipment controls, helps teams leverage IoT data and events for better performance.
In addition, Alchemy IoT has introduced “IoT Asset Intelligence,” a new industry approach that addresses the complexity and market fragmentation associated with Big Data, IoT and artificial intelligence. It outlines today’s disruptive mega-trends, and Alchemy’s industry insights and vision, before outlining practical steps organizations can use to align company goals, resources and teams toward value streams centered on industrial equipment, fleets and operational performance.
“IoT Asset Intelligence combines our best thinking into an actionable framework to plan, implement and gain value from AI-based IoT initiatives – especially for smaller organizations that may lack the resources for expensive consultants and data scientists,” said Victor Perez, CEO of Alchemy. “We are committed to the customer journey as much as the technology that is transforming the way industrial companies operate and win in the market.”
Recent studies by the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimate that by the year 2020 there will be 30 billion connected devices globally. With connected devices outputting sensor data 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the sheer scale of data production is staggering. The IoT Asset Intelligence framework provides practical steps for improving operational efficiencies, empowering better decision making, promoting collaboration and innovation, and delivering more value to the organization.
The central theme of the IoT Asset Intelligence framework is visibility and efficiency through a blend of data-driven processes and a renewed culture around innovation and critical thinking. Like Lean and other operational improvement methods, IoT Asset Intelligence requires executive support and leadership to achieve sustainable success – as change and breaking with entrenched norms is as much a cultural “transformation” exercise as it is a process and technology play.
The following are the IoT Asset Intelligence Core Tenets:
Appoint an IoT Champion: to be the single-point-of-contact, for the initiative and to help shift company culture.
Establish top-line goals and ROI Opportunities: establish goals early in the process to have a clear path to success.
Conduct Asset and Process Assessments: identify new data points to gain a strong understanding of what existing assets and processes exist in the organization to better optimize them.
Identify Processes for Improvement and Align New Value Streams: these processes are the best candidates for improvement.
Apply AI and Machine Learning for Data Analytics and Automated Workflows: not all data is good data – leverage AI to filter out irrelevant data to make data streams more powerful.
Present Performance Data in Graphs for Contextual 360-degree Views: teams need to access performance data in a clear, visual representation that will allow them not only to see progress, but identify areas for improvement.
Integrate with Existing ERP, EAM, MRO and MRP Platforms: work with existing tools to optimize and enhance current processes, not just create new ones.
Provide Graphical Intelligence for Executive Decision-making and Strategic Planning: leverage data intelligence to make meaningful business decisions at the highest levels.
Practice Continuous Improvement: always improve – never be satisfied.
Alchemy will soon publish a comprehensive paper on the IoT Asset Intelligence framework that will be available from its website.