The Bengaluru-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) company declined to share the name of the fund. Other funds—Axilor Ventures and Pi Ventures—and angel investors—Alstrut India managing director Anuj Bihani and former chief executive of Cognizant Laxmi Narayan—among other returning investors also participated in the funding round, dubbed Series A.
The company, with 80% of revenues generated from India and 20% from the United States, has raised $5.2 million in total so far. It works across 50 plants of its 20 clients across the two regions with $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, co-founder Aniruddha Banerjee told ET.
The company entered the US seven months ago. The fresh investment will help the startup continue rapid growth in India, scale internationally with large enterprises, make key hires in sales and technology and also invest in research and development, it said in the statement.
The 35-member team is expected to expand to 60 by July, Banerjee added. “Our proprietary deep learning-based algorithms can adapt with minimal domain data to provide highly accurate, high-speed defect detection. With this funding, we plan to expand our technology and research and development teams and focus on unlocking never-before-solved use cases in manufacturing,” Avra Banerjee, co-founder, SwitchOn, said.
The two Banerjees, first cousins, co-founded the company in 2020. While Aniruddha Banerjee is an ex-Nvidia and ex-Samsung employee, Avra Banerjee is an ex-Schneider and ex-Team Indus employee.
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SwitchOn software helps its clients in manufacturing industries reduce defects and improve product quality. The clientele includes consumer goods majors Unilever and ITC and Swedish bearing and seal manufacturing company SKF.Banerjee told ET about 60% of SwitchOn’s revenues are clocked from consumer packaged goods companies, 32% from automobile companies and the rest 8% from pharmaceutical companies.
The company’s DeepInspect tool identifies surface defects by using less than 200 images and simultaneously training its artificial intelligence model, thereby helping manufacturers adopt and completely automate quality inspection while also deploying hundreds of stock keeping units within days.
“While manufacturing companies globally employ more than 25% of their workforce on quality inspection alone, they still face over 50 customer complaints per plant every year, leading to a spending of over $6.5 billion in brand reputation impact, product wastage and losses,” the statement added.
“SwitchOn has unlocked the inspection of complex use cases in automotive parts, consumer goods and pharmaceuticals, which shows the robustness and scalability of the platform. Since Day 1, we have been extremely impressed by Aniruddha, Avra, and the entire team at SwitchOn, and are excited to continue supporting them as they build a world-leading vision AI company from India,” said Shubham Sandeep, managing director, Pi Ventures.
