KONUX – Predicting asset health with smart sensors and AI

For businesses looking to keep track of their assets and how they are performing, KONUX offers the perfect solution. The product provides clients with the exact data they need to drive descriptive and predictive analytics at the right time. The customization of smart sensor systems allows specific and accurate measurements in each industry. With KONUX ANDROMEDA, data-driven insights are visualized in real-time, giving managers the data they need to optimize the return on investment of their deployed assets.

The Team and Story

Andreas Kunze, Vlad Lata, and Dennis Humhal founded Konux.com in Munich in 2014. The trio has the vision to equip industrial assets with self-developed smart sensors and accelerate the digital transformation of their industrial customers to become data-driven companies.

KONUX has gathered a strong momentum, successfully participating in several start-up competitions and events, for example, the 100K Competition of Founder.org, EIT Digital Challenge – Cyber-Physical Systems, German Mobility Price and German Digital Price “The Spark”. Also, Forbes selected the founding team to make their 30 under 30 list in 2016. With KONUX being a young company that is evolving at rapid speed, these rewards show how much potential the marketplace, investors, the press and even the German ministry sees in the team.

What pain point does KONUX solve and what’s their magic sauce?

KONUX is all about delivering an integrated hardware and software solution that let’s industrial companies reduce their operating costs and improve productivity. What is the health status of my assets globally? When do I need to maintain them to increase uptime and longevity of machines? Do I manage my assets in a way that best monetizes their capacity?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Dashboard of KONUX ANDROMEDA user interface, courtesy of KONUX.com

The key competitive advantage is that KONUX can design and build smart sensors individually based on the technical requirements of each customer’s asset class. For example, a sensor for a railway switch needs different functionalities and robustness than, a sensor in a chemical plant. To improve the performance of the customer’s assets, KONUX needs to understand and map each industrial process, gain an in-depth technical understanding of the functioning of each of the machines and develop smart sensors that monitor vital functions in real-time. In short, KONUX identifies the relevant information that needs to be measured for each machine for each client. To build a digital twin of the industrial function, KONUX bundles all pertinent information – sensor and non-sensor sourced – in the cloud. In the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms start working the data. These algorithms analyze, filter and combine the most relevant data points to allow the transition from descriptive statistics to predicting future events. Lastly, KONUX visualizes the analytic results in a user-friendly software interface or directly delivers them into the customer’s platform.

Benefits for Customers

“Industrial companies are facing increasing challenges related to machine efficiency and maintenance expenses,” said Andreas Kunze, CEO of KONUX. “We believe the real impact and the toughest challenges of IoT are in the industrial world. We have designed solutions that allow for complete digitalization of manual measurements and comprehensive sensor data tracking and analytics, with the ultimate goal to shift from unplanned maintenance to predictive maintenance. As a consequence, our customers benefit from a reduction of maintenance cost 25%+ and an increase of machine uptime.”

Who has invested how much in KONUX?

KONUX has attracted $9.5 million in funding from 12 investors. The most recent financing was obtained in April 2016 and was worth $7.5 million with New Enterprise Associates (the largest Silicon Valley VC who backed Uber or Salesforce) being the lead investor. In April 2015, $2 million worth of funding was received with Michael Baum (Founding CEO of Splunk) the lead investor. Raising such an amount as first-time entrepreneurs is quite a significant achievement, but even more interesting are the people who backed KONUX. As the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and having written one of the first cheques for Google, Andreas Bechtolsheim is a legend in Silicon Valley. With his participation in the Seed and Series A round, KONUX will not only be able to benefit from the network of Andreas, but his experience in building companies and technical expertise as an electrical engineer is an invaluable asset for any start-up to have on board. Again a strong signal, underlining the potential of this Munich-based IIoT/AI venture.

What project has KONUX shipped and what is next?

KONUX is currently making its mark in the railway industry. The German Rail Operator “Deutsche Bahn AG” is rolling out KONUX’s solution to monitoring the health of their rail network switches. One of the most prominent causes of delays are switch failures, and KONUX’s solution will enable an optimal monitoring and maintenance routine of the switches. It detects changes and anomalies before problems arise and that in turn, will result in fewer switches breaking down and more trains arriving on time on the German rail network.

If you are an industrial company looking for a partner to drive your digital transformation, then you should contact KONUX.  Also, the company has grown to more than 35 people, is hiring to drive their expansion further, and so have a look at their jobs sections.