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First Resonance snags $14M for an operating system designed for factories

Pollution smoke emitting from factory smokestacks
Pollution smoke emitting from factory smokestacks

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First Resonance, a factory operating system for manufacturing customers, today announced that it raised $14 million in a series A round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Blue Bear Capital, Fika Ventures, Stage VP, Wavemaker, Village Global, Garuda Ventures, PLG, and Frontier. The company says that the proceeds will be put toward expanding First Resonance’s headcount and growing its customer base as it further develops its platform.

Today’s factories have evolved to the point where manufacturers test R&D alongside production workflows. That’s the assertion of First Resonance CEO Karan Talati, who cofounded the Los Angeles, California-based software company with Neal Sarraf in 2018. Talati was previously a manufacturing and software engineer at SpaceX, where he helped build a dynamics analysis module and introduced a company-wide barcode system.

Inventory Management Solutions

After experiencing bottlenecks building hardware products at SpaceX, Talati, Sarraf, and the rest of First Resonance’s founding team developed a platform to help engineers collaborate with teams and make decisions more quickly. Using First Resonance, engineers can track information to find answers in a manufacturing environment by tracing parts as they come into and managing workflows to respond to changes from the production floor.

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“First Resonance applies modern data techniques, analysis and machine learning, so that we can expose the data that is being generated off the platform, transforming and preparing it for our customers to make use of so they can create their own data powered manufacturing operations,” Talati told VentureBeat via email. “The main use cases are flexibility and traceability.”

Supply chain challenges

Talati sees First Resonance as addressing the needs of a manufacturing execution system market that could grow to over $14.9 billion in value by 2025. Since its launch in January 2020, the company has seen five times year-over-year growth and plans to triple its workforce in 2022 across product, engineering, sales, marketing, and operations to meet rising demand.

Recently, 20-employee First Resonance introduced new features designed to help manufacturers tackle mounting supply chain issues. The platform’s Autoplan functionality, for example, will analyze signals and data within existing inventory, the supply chain, purchase orders, and work-in-progress to give manufacturers a forecast of what they need to do next to deliver their products on time. 

Inventory Management Solutions

Investors are pouring increasing amounts of capital into startups developing technologies for the industrial and manufacturing sectors. In May, Bright Machines — which aims to automate manufacturing operations in factories and make manufacturing hardware as simple as building software — raised $435 million by going public via SPAC. And in January, Oqton, a startup developing a factory operating system that integrates engineering software with manufacturing hardware, raised $40 million.

The manufacturing operations management software market was valued at $7.21 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $15.21 billion by 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 9.5% from 2019 to 2026, according to Allied Market Research.

“First Resonance has grown its annual recurring revenue by 500% year-over-year … We currently have over 30 customers across aerospace, robotics, automotive, additive manufacturing, and heavy machinery,” Talati continued. “With [our] new features, engineers, certification auditors, quality teams, and more are able to quickly determine how to build products faster. The [First Resonance platform can] collect and analyze multiple complex signals and a large amount of data within existing inventory, the supply chain, purchase orders, and work in progress to give manufacturers a forecast of what they need to do next to deliver their products on time.”

First Resonance has raised $19.3 million in total capital.

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