Momenta invests in Raven to empower frontline workers and plant managers to improve operational outcomes.
Momenta announced today that it is leading the first institutional investment in Raven, a leading provider of digital solutions that help manufacturers gain visibility into their production efficiency and boost their continuous improvement.
Raven’s software combines and analyzes operator input and machine data to provide a clear timeline of all operations efficiency and production losses — with context for everything happening on the line 100% of the time.
This is the ninth investment from Momenta’s AIoT Ecosystem Fund, powered by Advantech, the world leader in digital industrial solutions. With this financing, Raven will scale its software solution and sales organization.
PROBLEM
Manufacturers rely on lean production systems and industrial automation software to manage operations, eliminate waste and drive continuous improvement. People-centric lean principles and information automation technologies have enabled significant gains, yet today many manufacturers still face two big problems: (i) achieving Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) beyond 60-70%, and (ii) meeting demand with the skilled employees and infrastructure available.
Industry 4.0 has improved the situation by leveraging advances in digital technologies, including real-time analytics, a connected workforce, IoT/edge/cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. The leading reason companies invest in manufacturing execution systems (MES) is to improve key decisions (Gartner Research), yet 68% of firms still don’t trust their data enough to use it to make operating decisions (Accenture).
SOLUTION
Raven believes that typical operations data captured by MES isn’t comprehensive enough for optimal operations execution and improvement.
With a deep understanding of manufacturing operations, lean thinking, and digital technology, Raven’s solution addresses a shortcoming of current digital transformation efforts with Automated Contextualization, Smart Front-line Assistants, and its OEE/Asset Performance Management App.
Automated Contextualization transforms data from people, machines, and IT/OT infrastructure to curate a more detailed, accurate, and meaningful account of all time, accounting for all production losses in real-time. Contextualization is an essential foundation of the digital factory, providing the context for insights to be meaningful and actionable. Raven is unique in its ability to curate contextualized timelines because its industry-leading solutions enable context to be easily collected from the production team with an automated categorization of events and losses.
Smart Frontline Assistants augment frontline workers to engage them in the context capture and results improvement processes. Manufacturing remains a people business, and people must act on improvements to activate improvements. Raven believes that digital solutions focusing solely on machine-generated data, without engaging and augmenting workers, will fail to deliver the expected results. Raven’s Smart Assistants are user-friendly applications tailored to each production team member's role and needs, connecting operators, supervisors, production planning, engineering, CI/Kaizen teams, plant, and corporate management to shared goals and a single trusted source of truth.
"Engaging front-line manufacturing workers seems like an obvious thing to do, but Raven was the first company that achieved a breakthrough engaging workers and management toward a sustained effort to improve their outcomes," says Michael Dolbec, Momenta's Managing Partner.
“As we move into an age of unlimited computing power and analytical capability, ROI from technology investments will increasingly depend on the quality of our data. In manufacturing, context from factory workers is the linchpin that enables fully contextualized data and the ability to account for every second of production time,” said Martin Cloake, CEO and Co-Founder of Raven.ai. “Engaging frontline operations by creating a valuable experience for the user is the only way to obtain sufficient context to create the high-quality data needed to drive meaningful and sustainable improvement.”
Jerry O’Gorman, VP at Advantech IIOT division, stated, "We are delighted to participate in this investment in Raven. Raven’s ability to leverage the critical human context with the core machine data in an automated way is crucial for delivering large-scale rapid process and efficiency improvements. We see great opportunities to collaborate with Raven to help scale up impactful contextualized automation solutions across various industry sectors."
About Raven:
Raven is a leading provider of digital solutions that help manufacturers gain visibility into their production efficiency and boost their continuous improvement initiatives. Raven’s solutions are designed with an operator-first mindset and leverage proprietary IoT/edge devices and AI to unite various sources of manufacturing data to deliver a unique and accurate timeline of information. Raven serves manufacturers globally in Discrete Manufacturing, Food and Beverage, Pharmaceuticals, Agri-Food, Healthcare, and more. For more information, visit www.raven.ai.
About Advantech:
Advantech has the corporate vision to "Enable an Intelligent Planet." The company is a global leader in IoT, intelligent systems, and embedded platforms. To embrace the trends of IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, Advantech promotes IoT hardware and software solutions with the industrial IoT platform WISE-PaaS core to assist business partners and clients in connecting their industrial chains. Advantech is also working with business partners to co-create business ecosystems that accelerate the goal of industrial intelligence. For more information, please visit https://www.advantech.com.
About Momenta:
Momenta is the leading Digital Industry venture capital + growth firm. We accelerate entrepreneurs and leaders devoted to the digitization of energy, manufacturing, smart spaces, and supply chains. Since 2012, our team of deep industry operators have made over 100 investments in entrepreneurs and helped scale over 150 industry leaders via our award-winning executive search and strategic advisory practices. For more information, please visit https://www.momenta.one.
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Momenta is the leading Digital Industry venture capital + growth firm accelerating deep tech innovators across energy, manufacturing, smart spaces, and supply chain. For over a decade, our team of deep industry operators have helped scale industry leaders and innovators via our award-winning executive search and strategic advisory teams.
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