Aussie IIoT company MOVUS gets VC injection

Brisbane-headquartered company MOVUS, the developer of Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) sensor and machine monitoring solution FitMachine, has secured $4.8 million in Series A funding. The round, led by Blackbird Ventures, included Telstra Ventures and Skip Capital (Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s private investment fund).

The investment will allow MOVUS to scale up to international markets, further refine its product, expand its research and development, and grow its Brisbane-based team.

In just under two years, MOVUS has developed and launched a cost-effective IIoT sensor and software-as-a-service (SaaS) monitoring platform, FitMachine. The platform uses artificial intelligence to help organisations proactively monitor, manage and maintain the condition of their industrial machinery, reducing the need for manual inspections and turning unplanned outages into planned situations. The predictive maintenance market is expected to be a US$5 billion industry by 2021.

“This Series A funding is critical as we are poised to scale with many new customer deployments which allow us to accelerate growth globally and pass on the benefits to customers via more rapid delivery of improvements,” said Brad Parsons, CEO and founder of MOVUS. “We’ll also be growing our engineering team and are particularly interested in people with a passion for hardware design and machine learning.

“Our vision is to transform machines across their life cycle to dramatically improve these industries for the benefit of the planet.”

With a track record of investing in high-growth digital businesses, Rick Baker, co-founder of Blackbird Ventures, said, “Industrial machinery is the engine room of our economy and the FitMachine plays a crucial role in ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. We’re proud to join the journey of MOVUS.”

“Telstra is a national and global leader in IoT, with Australia’s largest IoT footprint that is already connecting more than two million IoT devices. We recently announced two new IoT technologies in our mobile network — Cat M1 and Narrowband, and in 2017 opened Australia’s first publicly accessible Open IoT Lab in Melbourne,” said Matthew Koertge, managing director at Telstra Ventures. “We believe that MOVUS aligns well with our broader IoT strategy, providing a compelling IoT value proposition for machinery owners and a unique opportunity to capture value in the ‘Industry 4.0’ market.”

MOVUS serves the transportation, oil and gas, mining, energy, manufacturing, water and utilities, agriculture, building and facilities management sectors. It has already secured a growing list of domestic and international clients including Wesfarmers Chemicals, Melbourne Water, University of Queensland, Unitywater and Bombardier Transportation among others.