Miami — In any factory there are a lot of moving pieces, literally, so it’s a challenge to monitor and manage productivity. That’s where Pulsar, a Palo Alto-based company that operates in Mexico, comes in. The company offers sensors and software that when used together can monitor the entire factory in real time.
“One of the advantages is that it’s an end-to-end solution. We get the data from our sensors and we build in real-time performance indicators for every type of process, and that’s something very unique,” said Matias Castillo, co-founder and CEO of Pulsar.
Today, the company, founded by two Chileans, announced a $3.6 million seed round with participation from Global Founders Capital, Jaguar Ventures, Picus Capital, and Kayyak Ventures.
“The product is a SaaS analytics platform that helps traditional manufacturers monitor their factory performance in real-time and improve their operations. It combines smart sensors with AI to provide immediate visibility into any production process, and can be deployed in any factory in less than a day,” said Castillo.
The company targets mid market manufacturing companies who traditionally relied on machine operators to collect the data from the machines manually -- but that’s an expensive and unreliable process. Alternatively, companies would download data from the machines’ computers, but that too, is a clunky approach.
In either case, the data has been gathered historically, meaning adjustments couldn’t be made in real-time.
“We can implement Pulsar in a day, [and] they can check it out without any commitment, and they [can] see the added value from day one,” Castillo told Bloomberg Línea.
The company launched in October, 2020 and today has 13 employees across the globe including in the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Peru and India. In less than a year, it acquired 40 enterprise customers and oversees about 500 machines.
The company makes money by offering its software and implementation for free and then charging a subscription for its services. The first 3-6 months are at a discounted rate as it’s considered a trial period.
Castillo, who holds an MBA and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, met his co-founder, Juan Cristóbal Ruiz-Tagle, in Chile and the two realized they had complementary skill-sets. Ruiz-Tagle had founded an industrial productivity consultancy in Chile which he ran for nearly four years.
“We realized that if we joined what I know about machine learning and software, with what he knows about the factory floor, we could come together and develop a standardized, simple way for the mid-market to digitize the data collecting,” Castillo told Bloomberg Línea.
The two launched the business, and in March of this year Cristian Bartolome joined as a co-founder and lead engineer.
Now that the company feels it’s achieved product market fit, the team plans to use the money from this round to grow the business in Mexico, expand into the U.S. market, and “prepare for a strong Series A [round] in 2022,” Castillo said.
