Technology company Datch has secured $3.2 million in seed funding for its “Voice-Visual” AI assistant for industry.
The funding round saw participation from Blue Bear Capital as the lead investor, along with support from Stage Venture Partners, Tuhua Ventures, Lorimer Ventures, Predictive Venture Partners, and Plug and Play Ventures.
“With industry-leading partners on board from the energy and manufacturing sectors and with a focus on digital transformation, we are well-positioned to help improve the way industrial organizations capture worker-based knowledge at the frontlines,” Datch CEO and co-founder Mark Fosdike said.
The funding announcement coincides with Datch’s hands-free workplace initiative, designed to reduce deskless worker dependencies on common physical touchpoints, a particularly important subject for worker health and safety, given the current environment.
Formed in the UK in 2018 by Australian Mark Fosdike and New Zealanders Aric Thorn and Ben Purcell, the now US-based company is at the forefront of developing intelligent voice AI solutions for industrial environments.
“We’re all engineers with experience working on projects across the globe in the aerospace, shipbuilding, and energy sectors. We formed the business after witnessing the incredible amount of time and energy our companies lost when it came to filling out paperwork on the shop floor,” Fosdike said.
He further added, “We soon realized that not only do frontline workers lose considerable time on a daily basis carrying out paper-based work and manually undertaking digital processes, but only 5 percent of employee knowledge is retained in a business due to lack of available time, quality factors, and unstructured data collection.
“What’s exciting is that Datch does away with traditional process forms and instead uses a Natural Language Engine to give workers the freedom to conversationally capture their knowledge as soon as it’s generated. Our platform lets them do this hands-free during the job without losing valuable tool time, resulting in significant productivity gains. Further to this, there are upstream advantages to capturing and structuring this knowledge data along with the play-by-play data, leading to important breakthroughs in asset-based insights.”
“Voice technology brings wider context and nuance to human and digital connections by improving the quality and experience of work for the frontline and accelerates knowledge capture and sharing for the organization,” Blue Bear Capital Partner Ernst Sack said.
Blue Bear’s Carolin Funk added, “We are particularly excited that Datch is bringing voice technologies to customers in important sectors like sustainable power generation and electric vehicle manufacturing.”
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