The Luxembourg startup keeps growing and attracting industrial partners. While a substantial amount has been raised, the exact numbers can’t be shared yet. But the big news is that Finindus completes Wizata’s latest funding round led by Volta Ventures and KBC Focus Fund, and backed by the original founders and initial investor, Expon Capital.
Photo: Jean-Philippe Hugo, CEO of Wizata / Credits © Eric Devillet
Can you tell me about the tools developed and services offered by Wizata?
Wizata provides industrials an AI-ready, data-driven platform, enabling them to develop and deploy their proprietary models.
Developed around its Digital Twin technology, the platform enables monitoring of production processes, with anomaly detection models, fast and enriched root cause analysis with Machine Learning algorithms, and ultimately, deployment of AI process control.
Leading companies in the material sector such as ArcelorMittal, Aperam, Carmeuse, Ceratizit, and Lafarge Holcim are leveraging the Wizata platform to autonomously increase their yield andimprove asset health and performance, all the while ensuring a high level of quality by avoiding defects.
Companies want to avoid the vendor lock-in mechanisms built into most platforms to maintain their competitive advantage. With our open platform, customers have full control of their data and models. They don’t have to share it with anyone and can keep their knowledge and their trade secrets to themselves.
What major evolutions has Wizata experienced over the last three years?
The Wizata platform has undergone major evolutions during the past three years. The team integrated Wizata’s experience from successful industrial process optimization projects and packaged it in a next-generation industrial AI and IoT platform.
What makes us successful and fundamentally different from existing solutions is that we understand that customers don’t want to share their industrial secrets, such as production recipes and methods, and that’s why the Wizata platform is built on privacy-by-design concepts where data, models, and IP are controlled exclusively by customers, and are not available to us or competitors.
“The raw materials industries market is mature and making its digital transformation.”
The platform provides a vast self-service experience for a wide range of industrial applications – starting from condition monitoring of assets to autonomous production. The platform manages the complexity of implementing these cutting-edge technologies so that customers can focus on their core business and generate more value.
Major highlights include an integrated digital twin based on the meta-and hypergraph foundation to enable modelling of complex manufacturing processes, stream intelligence jobs to empower users to deploy artificial intelligence, expert systems (with embedded Python coding) and rules (with a visual drag & drop editor) to production, events and alerts management, insights visualization through logical diagrams, and dashboards with specialized widgets, advanced interactive data analytics, granular user access and permission management.
The Wizata platform is available via a web application and a mobile application to use right from the production lines.
You have just completed a new round of funding. Who are your (new) partners?
Finindus completed the latest funding round led by Volta Ventures and KBC Focus Fund, and backed by the original founders and initial investor, Expon Capital.
Finindus is an investment company funded by ArcelorMittal and the Flemish Region, and is linked to OCAS, a world-class metal research centre. Volta Ventures provides (pre)seed and early-stage financing for software & internet companies that originate in the Benelux. KBC Focus Fund is a €50 million venture capital fund that invests in advanced technologies with a particular emphasis on semiconductor, nanotechnology, and IoT.
We’re grateful that we could build upon the support of partners – such as Expon Capital and the Digital Tech Fund, the Ministry of Economy, Luxinnovation, Chamber of Commerce, and FEDIL – in Luxembourg since the start of Wizata.
What’s next? And what are your expectations for the next three years?
The raw materials industries market is mature and making its digital transformation. What was missing was a production-ready platform that allows them control of their data to facilitate the implementation of intelligent solutions and AI into real production.
It’s the perfect storm, the team will continue to work on our international expansion and to support the needs of our customers that are scaling their solutions into different production lines and plants globally.
We’ll be expanding our sales efforts, which should be easy with our track record of successful deployment of Industry 4.0 and AI solutions into production with a high return-of-investment for our customers.
The Wizata team will be expanding its partners’ networks to grow its sales capacity, and engage with customers wishing to become partners and resell our solutions in different verticals after they’ve tailored it for their specific industry and sub-industry sectors.
