Nanoprecise scales up to cut emissions through predictive maintenance
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Nanoprecise Sci Corp is scaling up to help companies around the world reduce their carbon footprint by improving the efficiency of their industrial equipment.
Earlier this month, the company announced it had raised US$10 million in a Series B round led by Export Development Canada (EDC). Honeywell Ventures, NSK Ltd., and EC Mergers & Acquisitions — all new investors — also participated in the round.
The company, founded in Edmonton in 2017, offers an end-to-end predictive asset maintenance and monitoring solution that uses artificial intelligence and IoT technology to help companies reduce unplanned downtime and gain clarity about the right things to fix.
But another interesting benefit — one that Graham Kawulka, chief commercial officer at Nanoprecise, told Taproot was of particular interest to EDC — is the improved energy efficiency that comes from having better-maintained equipment.
"It might sound funny, 'machine health monitoring' — it doesn't sound like cleantech at first, but it really is," Kawulka said. "When you have healthy machines, you use less power to run them, and it can be substantial, the amounts of wasted power and excessive greenhouse gas emissions just because you have poor maintenance."
The company has so far focused on serving the mining, metals, oil and gas, chemical, and cement industries, several of which are among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. "We're seeing a lot of interest from industrial players who are looking to improve their overall efficiency, while also getting all this other stuff."
The latest funding round, with participation from government and some of the largest industrial companies in the world, should help Nanoprecise close more deals, as it shows its target clientele that "we're growing up, and we're into that more mature startup phase," Kawulka said.
"We're really after enterprise-level customers that are pretty large, and when they look at startups there's an element of risk," he explained. "As you get along these milestones, it really helps to establish credibility."
Kawulka said about 30% of Nanoprecise's business is in India, thanks in part to founder and CEO Sunil Vedula's connections in the country where he was born. The company, which already has customers in more than 30 countries, also plans to expand further in the United States and is starting to enter the European market.
"We have lots to do, and we have so much runway. Some of the biggest opportunities we've seen in the history of the company started to come through in the last six months," Kawulka said. "We're starting to really experience brand recognition, which for a startup is amazing."
