Hive, a physical AI startup building a "silicon brain" to automate industrial machines, has raised a $15m pre-Series A round led by UK-based SuperSeed, with participation from US-based Veriten and Norwegian VCs Skyfall and Nysnø.
The startup, founded in Norway in 2020 and now headquartered in London, is developing a proprietary foundational model and software layer that can automate any on-site machine.
One use case is for teams running tunnelling and quarry operations, which can add a set of Hive’s sensors and software to a digger, turning it into a self-driving vehicle. For simple tasks, the machine is completely autonomous, but for more complex ones it’s controlled by a remote teleoperator who can work from home and control machines at multiple sites.
Hive’s tech can also be used on multiple machines being used by teams operating warehouses, production lines and construction sites. The company sells autonomy-as-a-service, says cofounder and CEO Christoffer Jørgensvaaghim. “What we actually are doing is that we're delivering work hours,” he tells Sifted.. “The only thing we're delivering is output, one work hour or one shift on any machine, any brand, any machine type that you might have.”
The company is currently deployed across several sites in Scandinavia, with offices in Norway. It is also planning to expand to London and across the Atlantic in the US, where it wants to capture market share.
“There's not a lot of competition right now,” says Jørgensvaaghim “Generally, the companies and the people we talk to haven't seen this kind of technology ever before. Maybe they've seen some lab tests, but they've never seen it actually working in real life.”
The funding will be used to further develop its platform, grow headcount with AI and robotics talent and scale commercial deployments with new and existing industrial partners.
According to Jørgensvaag, when its “silicon brain” is used fully it is expected to drive the productive machine-hour cost down by 80%.
“The world is changing very rapidly and it's driven by AI. We're in the middle of a new industrial revolution, and this industrial revolution will be much bigger than the last one, but it will also go much faster,” Jørgensvaag says.
“To me, all of this stuff is about creating positive abundance, right? Getting to a world where we can produce more, faster, better, more efficiently, but in a positive way.”
