It is common knowledge that a lot of small and mid-sized companies struggle to adopt cutting-edge technologies because of financial constraints and the time it takes to develop everything in-house. Gaining competitive advantage is crucial for companies to sustain market share, making it vital for them to stay ahead of the curve while not burning through resources.
This was a widespread problem that Alchemy IoT saw in technology circles, where it believes it can make a difference. “The main objective was to develop a solution that was able to help the customer gain a competitive advantage by getting more out of their assets,” says Victor Perez, president & CEO.
The startup provides IoT asset intelligence to industrial customers which empowers them to tap into technologies like artificial intelligence, IoT, and machine learning to transform their businesses and scale up their growth. Alchemy IoT’s new application Clarity is a SaaS, which delivers actionable intelligence, visualization, and context into industrial asset performance and health.
“Our idea was to create a framework because one of the challenges of IoT and AI is about monetizing the technology. We create software for physical assets which acts as its digital component and helps increase the return on the asset. We put this together in a low-cost manner and sell it to customers who don’t have big pockets,” explains Perez. “Our focus is in the area of fleet management, equipment maintenance, and manufacturing performance.”
One of the most significant problems that Alchemy IoT sees in its customers is that their physical assets are not optimized, thus reducing revenue due to operational inefficiencies. “Take for example a construction crane. It costs $1.5 million, and it is idle around 40% of the time,” notes Perez. “If you take that asset and make it operational 80% of the time instead of 40%, that is a huge saving for the company and can end up creating more revenue.”
Downtime costs companies between $10k to $50k per day, and the startup looks to tackle this through its asset intelligence software tools.
Alchemy IoT plans to work with fleet companies to better manage trucks – gather data from the fleets, use the data for analytics and provide insights on preventive maintenance and operational health, thereby reducing costs and time spent in repair sheds. Once deployed, the software begins to learn instantly, and provides tangible insights to customers within 48 hours of installation.
“In the freight industry, you have a lot of similar assets that behave in different ways, and that is where we could make a difference. Not only do we determine the health of a particular component, but we also measure the health of the total fleet,” explains Perez. “So you could have Truck A versus Truck B, and we can compare what is good and bad about each of them. Thus, the customer can get to know the best of both trucks.”
Alchemy IoT did its market validation with about five customers and has since raised seed funding of $4 million, which it plans to use on product development and scaling up. The startup is looking to partner with manufacturers that have been selling sensors to companies and sitting over large data storages over the years.
With the data procured, Alchemy IoT would provide services to specific customers of the manufacturers through insights derived from the existing data, by using machine learning and AI models.
Bottom line, Perez stresses that the company’s immediate objective is to scale and believes that businesses would be transformed with technology injection – which Alchemy IoT plans to provide SMEs, by simplifying the process and increasing the speed of them realizing their asset performance.
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