Walk into a mid-sized American machine shop and you will find equipment that predates the smartphone by decades - lathes, presses and CNC machines that still cut metal reliably but have no idea how to say so. For years, the people running those shops managed by clipboard, gut feel and the sound of a machine cycling. Amper Technologies was built on a simple observation: you cannot improve what you cannot see, and most factories genuinely could not see what their own machines were doing.
Founded in Chicago in 2016 by Akshat Thirani and Philip House, Amper set out to close that visibility gap without asking manufacturers to rip anything out. Thirani, a fourth-generation manufacturer who grew up inside a family business, understood the industry's allergy to disruption. The result was a piece of hardware that clips onto any machine - regardless of age or brand - and reads its electrical current to infer whether it is running, producing or idle. No wiring into the machine's controller. No six-month IT project. Install time: about ten minutes.
That ten-minute install became, in Thirani's own words, the company's "growth engine." A factory manager could order a self-install kit, clip it on during a shift change, and start seeing live utilization data the same afternoon. The friction that normally stalls industrial software - integrations, retrofits, IT approvals - was simply removed.
On top of the sensors, Amper built FactoryOS: a manufacturing platform that takes the raw signal and turns it into decisions. Managers see OEE, downtime, hour-by-hour timelines and cycle times. Operators get a tablet to log why a machine stopped. Owners get an honest answer to the question every factory quietly worries about - how much capacity are we leaving on the table?
The company raised an $11 million Series A in 2022, expanded across US manufacturers, and in December 2025 was acquired by ECI Software Solutions, which folded FactoryOS into its broader manufacturing software suite. What started as a clip-on sensor had become a category: real-time production monitoring for the factories the rest of the tech industry forgot.
