industrial-software
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Thomas Boucher-Charest and the value of what already works
A Montreal stock-market competitor grew into an investor and software operator. At Valstone, Thomas Boucher-Charest is helping build a manufacturing portfolio around a practical question: what should an acquisition preserve?
Charles Soll and the business of getting things there
After product work at Uber, Charles Soll co-founded Moab to connect the daily workings of equipment rental businesses. His story unfolds in customer meetings, dispatch decisions, and the unglamorous details that keep a fleet moving.
Veryable and the expensive fiction of an average day
A warehouse can hire for its average workload and still be wrong every morning. Veryable sells a way to match labor to the day that actually arrives - provided managers know what that day requires.
Innovapptive Inc: The expensive distance between knowing and doing
A factory can diagnose a problem and still struggle to fix it. Innovapptive connects the operator, the repair crew and the spare-parts shelf - making the handoff its business.
Datacor knows where the batch went
A chemical business runs on recipes, records and awkward little exceptions. Datacor has spent four decades turning those exceptions into software - and is now buying its way deeper into the plant.
Vericut finds the trouble before the metal does
A Mercedes F1 machining trial recovered 48 minutes from one component. Vericut’s larger proposition is to let manufacturers rehearse expensive decisions before the cutting starts.
Sigga and the surprisingly expensive trip to the printer
Factories buy sophisticated software, then send technicians out with paper. Sigga closes that peculiar gap between what SAP knows and what maintenance crews can actually do.
ESC Spectrum makes the smokestack show its work
A plant can measure its emissions and still struggle to explain them. ESC Spectrum sells the instruments, software, and human expertise that turn a stream of readings into a record someone can defend.
GSE Solutions lets nuclear plants rehearse the trouble
Before a reactor design meets the real world, GSE Solutions gives it a dress rehearsal. Its business connects plant physics, operator judgment, and the unglamorous engineering that keeps electricity flowing.
Wonderware put a window on the factory floor
A California software company bet that industrial operators deserved the same graphical world as office workers. Its name has moved into AVEVA, but the idea still runs through control rooms, production lines and the economics of keeping machines working.
ams.Group and the factory that makes everything once
A custom machine is a moving target with a delivery date. ams.Group has spent decades building software for the manufacturers who must price, plan, and produce it anyway.
Mastercam and the art of cutting corners
A machine can follow instructions perfectly and still make a mess. Mastercam has spent four decades helping manufacturers decide which instructions are worth following.
WI and the surprisingly expensive piece of paper
Wearable Intelligence went looking for the future in Google Glass. It found a bigger business in the binders on the factory floor - and became Parsable.
The Factory’s Blind Spot Had Hands
Drishti put cameras over manual assembly lines and turned the motions between machines into usable data. At HELLA, the useful discovery was neither a robot nor an algorithmic miracle - it was an awkward reach across a workbench.
Erik Mirandette and the Long Road to the Factory Floor
Before he helped put software into factories, Erik Mirandette crossed Africa by dirt bike, served in military counterintelligence and learned a durable lesson: useful systems begin with the people closest to the problem.
Brian Parsonnet Kept Finding Better Uses for Yesterday’s Data
Across four decades, the Seeq co-founder has pursued one stubborn idea: the machines already know plenty. The useful work begins when people can finally ask them better questions.
KBC finds the money hiding in a refinery’s energy bill
The Yokogawa-owned company pairs process simulation with engineering advice to cut waste in energy and chemicals. Its most revealing lesson: even a good digital twin needs someone responsible for acting on it.
GDi Turned the North Sea's Messy Asset Records Into a Working Digital Twin
The clever part is not the 3D model. It is the handoff from a corroded pipe on-screen to an engineered, fabricated repair - without sending another measuring crew offshore.
The Gearbox Whisperers Teaching Electric Cars to Lose Their Whine
Inside SMT's stubbornly practical bet that the fastest route to a quieter, tougher electric powertrain is to stop passing its parts between disconnected simulation tools.
C3 AI Spent $3 Billion Building the Enterprise AI Future. Now It Has to Sell It.
C3 AI built for the unglamorous places where a bad prediction can ground an aircraft or stop a refinery. After a bruising fiscal year, founder Tom Siebel is back in the CEO chair to prove that deep technology can become a durable business.
Bret Boyd Is Building the Missing Switchboard for American Manufacturing
After four Iraq deployments and a career spent watching organizations wrestle with change, the Sustainment co-founder has chosen an unglamorous but consequential target: the friction keeping 250,000 American manufacturers apart.
Lauren Dunford Is Teaching Old Machines to Tell the Truth
Her company began with an energy thesis in Kenya. The breakthrough came when factory teams showed her that the same electrical heartbeat could reveal something more urgent: where production was getting lost.
Cordance Is Collecting the Software Nobody Notices - Until It Stops Working
The Raleigh software group is assembling a portfolio of niche B2B tools for warehouses, campuses, laboratories and thrift stores - then betting that patient ownership and shared operating muscle can make small specialists stronger.
Third Prime Is Betting the Next Big Software Company Wears Work Boots
The New York and Nashville venture firm hunts for software in places where clipboards, compliance binders and fragmented workflows still run the day. Its portfolio shows a consistent wager: overlooked industries can become unusually durable technology markets.
The $100 Million Fund That Thinks Venture Capital Needs a Workshop
Baukunst writes the first check, then pulls up a workbench. Its experiment is to make a venture fund behave more like a living studio - one where founders, engineers, designers and operators build in public with one another.
Catherine Kniker
Catherine Kniker began by decoding crashed computers. Now the Irish-born PTC executive is working on a larger systems problem: helping manufacturers connect product data, business strategy and sustainability before the first part reaches the factory floor.
PTC
For four decades, PTC has sold the software behind the objects people rarely think of as software projects. Now it is simplifying its portfolio around a bigger bet: that clean, connected product data will become the operating memory for industrial AI.
Schneider Electric
The 190-year-old industrial group has become the control layer for an electric economy - linking breakers, factories, buildings and AI data centers to the software that decides how power should move.
Emerson
Emerson spent a century making the machinery of modern life. Now it is assembling something harder to see: the digital nervous system for factories, power grids and process plants.
Tim Zinkl
Tim Zinkl is the CEO and co-founder of Pairio (YC P26), an AI mobile app that helps factory technicians fix broken machines faster. Raised across Brazil, Spain, and China and schooled in the UK and Germany, he built an events business in college, was an early employee at battery-recycling startup tozero, and teamed up with engineer Matthias Wolf - whom he met at a Technical University of Munich entrepreneurship scholarship - to attack the expensive, everyday problem of machine downtime on the factory floor.