Los Angeles-based First Resonance closed a new funding round led by Blue Bear Capital as the company looks to help customers with their Industry 4.0 evolution.
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No amount was given for the new round, but the company now has raised $5.3 million to date since being founded in 2018.
First Resonance has grown from zero customers at the beginning of last year to 17 now, and expects to at least double that number by the end of the year, said founder and CEO Karan Talati.
The company plans to use the new money to continue developing its ion manufacturing platform, which helps engineers through the design, manufacturing and product stages of hardware development. However, whereas the previous era of manufacturing focused on robotics and automation, First Resonance’s platform allows for the continuous innovation and updating now expected in the Industry 4.0 era, Talati said.
“It used to be about speed and throughput,” he said. “Now it’s about improvement.”
Changing world
As manufacturing was evolving, the world also was going through big changes last year as the pandemic sent many to work from home and briefly stifled manufacturing.
“We started at a pretty chaotic time,” Talati said.
However, he saw the events of last year as an opportunity to push the platform forward, helping to make hardware manufacturing easier even as most things in the physical world were getting harder.
While software development is difficult, there are many platforms and companies dedicated to making it easier, he said. The ion platform strives to do that for hardware-makers — ideally being what AWS is for software development.
“Software development is hard,” he said. “Hardware is even more difficult because it is in the physical.”
Looking ahead
First Resonance will continue to look for customers in industries such as air travel, autonomous vehicles, sustainable agriculture and clean energy as it competes with older solutions from Dassault Systemes and PTC, Talati siad.
Vaughn Blake, a partner at Blue Bear Capital, said he can see First Resonance playing a vital role in those growing markets as heavy manufacturing looks for a next-generation platform.
“First Resonance software will embed itself in this next wave of manufacturing,” Blake said.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.
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