Machines still go dark. Factories still bleed energy. Line supervisors still run on gut feel and clipboards. Lucas Funes decided that was absurd - and spent a decade building the platform that fixes it without a single line of code.
Start with the mechanic. Before the engineering degree, before the master's, before the Silicon Valley address, Lucas Funes trained as a machine-tools technician at Instituto Técnico Renault in Córdoba, Argentina. He learned to work metal before he learned to work software. That grounding in physical machinery - the actual weight and failure modes of industrial equipment - runs like rebar through everything Webee does today.
The path from the shop floor to the C-suite was not a straight line. Funes earned his Electronic Engineering degree at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional with a telecommunications specialization, then spent over a decade co-founding and leading Enorbitas Group as CTO, building enterprise technology products across multiple industry verticals. Another stint as COO at ESG Studios. A chapter-lead role at Startup Weekend. Each role a different lens on the same essential problem: organizations drowning in complexity they cannot tame.
In 2011, he added a Master's in Innovation Technology Management from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba to his credentials. Two years later, he and co-founder Ana Cecilia Flores launched Webee. The premise was sharp and specific: industrial IoT was not failing because of bad hardware or bad algorithms. It was failing because the path from sensor to insight required a specialist army - data engineers, scientists, programmers, systems integrators - that most manufacturers cannot afford or retain.
Funes named the problem in language that cuts right to the bone: "You need engineers who understand how to extract data and put it into a database. You need data scientists skilled in processing data. You need programmers who can write code for APIs or to send SMS or emails to notify the business that the temperature of a given machine needs to be adjusted. Then you need to put all these pieces together. This is all expensive and takes too much time." The response was not a consulting firm or a services pitch. It was a patented, no-code platform that collapsed that specialist stack into something anyone on the operations floor can run.
In 2015, Webee made the jump to Silicon Valley, planting headquarters in Sunnyvale. The following year, Funes joined the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program, a cohort specifically built around scaling innovation - fitting for a company whose entire thesis is scaling access to technology that was previously gated behind expensive expertise.
Today Webee operates as an AI-powered IIoT platform for what Funes calls Industry 5.0: the era where sustainability metrics and worker well-being sit alongside OEE and throughput as primary KPIs. The platform monitors machine health, water consumption, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions in real time, using edge AI processing and computer vision. A Fortune 50 CPG multinational deployed it across global factories to centralize dashboards, gain production visibility, and identify bottlenecks using LoRaWAN-connected battery-powered sensors.
Webee's investor roster spans BDev Ventures, Gaingels, Dellin Investments, Kamay Ventures, and Keiretsu Forum, among others, with the most recent round closed in March 2023. The company operates across the United States, Mexico, Central America, Costa Rica, and Argentina - still connected to the Córdoba roots while playing a genuinely global game.
Funes frames Webee's ultimate ambition simply but ambitiously: "We envision a future where sustainability and workers' well-being are integral to the manufacturing landscape." That is not a mission-statement flourish. It is the design brief. Every feature the platform ships is measured against that standard.
"There has to be a better way. This is why we purpose-built the Webee SmartFactory platform."
"I firmly believe in technology and the endless possibilities it brings to create transcendental things for humanity."