Brisbane Internet of Things startup Movus raises $4.8 million Series A round

Brisbane Internet of Things (IoT) startup Movus has raised $4.8 million in a Series A round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Telstra Ventures and Scott Farquhar’s Skip Capital.

Founded by Brad Parsons and Michel Lamarre in 2015, Movus has developed FitMachine, a combined sensor and software solution that helps organisations monitor and maintain their industrial machinery and other assets.

The system works by mounting a FitMachine sensor to an asset, with the sensor then collecting and sending data to the cloud.

The software’s machine learning algorithms work to establish a baseline for the condition of the equipment, and continually monitor and analyse the data to predict the health of the asset. Alerts are sent if the asset’s condition goes below pre-determined limits.

The funding will be put towards growing the startup’s team, expanding its research and development lab, further refining of its product, and expanding internationally.

With a view to reducing the need for manual inspections and the occurences of unplanned outages, Movus is playing in the ‘predictive maintenance’ – or Industry 4.0 – market, which is expected to be worth US$5 billion by 2021.

The startup is already serving clients in industries including oil and gas, building and asset management, and agriculture, among them the likes of Wesfarmers Chemicals and the University of Queensland.

Parsons, CEO of Movus, said the startup’s vision is to “transform machines across their lifecycle to dramatically improve these industries for the benefit of the planet”.

He said, “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. We’ll also be growing our engineering team and are particularly interested in people with a passion for hardware design and machine learning.”

Fresh off announcing the close of the firm’s third fund today, Blackbird Ventures cofounder Rick Baker said the firm is proud to join the journey of Movus.

“Industrial machinery is the engine room of our economy and the FitMachine plays a crucial role in ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently,” he said.

Matthew Koertge, managing director at Telstra Ventures, added, “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.”

Telstra has been working across IoT for some time; the company last year announced a continuation of a partnership with Ericsson that has the organisations working to launch a Cat-M1 Internet of Things (IoT) network throughout Australia.

The investment for Telstra Ventures follows its backing of Californian drone software startup Cape last month.

Founded in 2014, Cape has developed software aimed at making drones both safer and easier to use, with its drone telepresence and data management system allowing users to fly a drone and capture footage from unlimited distances without needing to touch any hardware.

Image: Brad Parsons. Source: Supplied.