Swiss industrial monitoring company AVIAN has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding to expand its thermal monitoring system into more high-risk industries across Europe and North America.
The Zurich-based company said it will use the funding to grow its engineering and deployment teams and expand beyond the wood industry into recycling, chemical processing, mining, oil and gas, and maritime operations.
Founderful led the funding round for AVIAN, which spent two years operating without outside funding before raising fresh capital.
During that period, the company built a customer base across about 50 industrial sites in nine countries and says its systems have helped prevent more than $50 million in fire and equipment damage.
Industrial operators have faced high insurance expenses in recent years as ageing machinery, electrical faults and dust-related fire risks continue to increase. In some cases, insurers now consider facilities too risky to cover at affordable rates.
AVIAN says many factories still rely on periodic thermal inspections carried out with handheld cameras. According to the company, that approach usually misses early warning signs that appear hours before equipment failure or fire outbreaks.
Its platform uses thermal cameras to monitor machinery continuously. The system tracks heat changes in motors, bearings, conveyors, presses and electrical cabinets, then sends alerts when temperatures begin to drift outside normal patterns.
The company said customers can install the system within minutes and receive automated maintenance reports alongside round-the-clock support.
Several manufacturers using the platform have already reported operational gains.
Kamps Pallet reduced annual insurance costs by 10% at its Dillwyn sawmill after deploying AVIAN’s monitoring system. Sierra Pacific Industries also avoided more than 24 hours of unplanned downtime at its Quincy facility over the past year, according to the company.
AVIAN noted that its system has also detected small fire incidents before they escalated.
In Switzerland, the platform identified a pellet press fire early enough to prevent what the company described as millions in potential damage. In Germany, it detected an electrical fire beside a machine valued at several million dollars, helping operators contain the incident before production was disrupted.
“AVIAN has developed a solution to a problem which probably affects everyone in the industry directly. For us, it is a great partnership as it helps us make our operations much safer and improves the monitoring process.
“You will never be able to reduce the risk of fires to zero, but you can do everything you can to minimise the danger as much as possible, and AVIAN makes that possible in a simple and straightforward way,” said Ernest Schilliger, CEO Schilliger Holz.
The company was founded after a Swiss sawmill contacted the team about recurring fires, high downtime and growing insurance pressure.
Drew Hanover, AVIAN’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the company focused first on building trust with operators before seeking investment.
“Most operators don’t need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it,” Hanover said.
“We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are. We spent zero minutes on a deck.”
AVIAN now plans to leverage the new funding to strengthen its work with insurers by providing real-time risk assessments using live thermal data from industrial sites.
The company is also developing a new product called AVIAN Vision, which upgrades existing CCTV systems to detect smoke and fire without replacing current infrastructure.
