Enabling industrial IoT. Our investment in Zerynth
November 15th, 2022
From left to right: Giacomo Baldi, Daniele Mazzei, Gabriele Montelisciani
Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Zerynth, the industrial tech startup supporting companies in digitizing production processes and developing connected industrial products through Industrial IoT solutions. We are leading this investment with the participation of Vertis SGR with Venture Factory through the VV3TT Fund, LIFTT, and CDP Venture Capital with the “Comparto IndustryTech” of the Corporate Partners Fund.
The company closed a €5.3 million Series A to expand its services across Europe and to make AI and IoT technologies increasingly accessible. Zerynth developed an IoT platform, provided as-a-service, composed of edge devices and cloud/AI interface, that helps companies connect industrial machines and optimize industrial processes, with a wide range of integrability and the highest industrial quality standards.
Zerynth was co-founded in 2015 by Gabriele Montelisciani, Giacomo Baldi, Daniele Mazzei, and Gualtiero Fantoni. All of them come from an academic experience, and the technology behind Zerynth results from academic research at the University of Pisa. They envisioned a world of connected, digitized, and sustainable business processes that makes people’s lives easier.
Zerynth is addressing the extended manufacturing market, in particular process and product manufacturing, agriculture, and energy from sustainable resources. It is a huge market, in constant growth and already ripe for adoption of IoT solutions – even more so due to the recent pandemic crises that have highlighted the need to digitalize and optimize industrial processes. The global Internet of Things (IoT) market size was valued at approximately $310 billion in 2020 and is anticipated to reach around $1,842 billion by 2028.
With a growing demand for automated, easy-to-use machines and equipment and the need for efficient and reliable data, many organizations are working to implement strategies for Artificial Intelligence, edge computing, digital twins, and other cloud applications. Although IoT projects are maturing, manufacturing companies keep facing several challenges in this digitalization and integration process, such as legacy equipment (most facilities continue to depend on production equipment that, on average, is 20 to 25 years old), technical complexities, and security issues. Every year, manufacturing companies lose $0,5M for not digitizing and integrating their operating equipment; and due to the scarce robustness of typical IoT solutions, nearly 30% of companies fail to implement IoT.
This is where Zerynth comes in, providing a complete end-to-end, hardware–software IoT solution to enable the digital transformation of any industrial process, with the widest range of integrability and the highest industrial-quality standards. Their platform enables the connection of any legacy and new machine to a cloud infrastructure that allows the provisioning, remote update of the firmware, and distribution of algorithms of data analytics and AI between the cloud and Zerynth’s edge devices. Through the cloud, such machines are integrated with a proprietary dashboard of data analytics, ERPs, and business intelligence solutions in a flexible, scalable, secure, and efficient way.
But this is not the only strenght of the company. Gabriele, Giacomo and Daniele impressed us from the beginning, showing vision, strong technical expertise, and capacity to execute efficiently, with a clear understanding of the market. They have been able to build a team with strong technical and industrial expertise, and the link with academia significantly contributes to bringing tech talents on board. They developed a set of products that are not only technologically solid but also create a complete, scalable, high-quality ecosystem, which is rare to find in this sector.
We are excited to welcome Zerynth in our portfolio and look forward to supporting the team as they push the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices across Europe and beyond!
Read more in the press release (ITA – ENG)
UV2’s investment in Zerynth is also supported by the European Investment Fund through InnovFin Equity, with financial backing from the European Union under the financial instruments of Horizon 2020 and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (“EFSI”) established under the Investment Plan for Europe. The purpose of EFSI is to support the financing and implementation of productive investments in the European Union and ensure greater access to finance.
