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.

The startup’s debut product, Chipmind Agents, is aimed at automating the repetitive, low-level work that ties up engineering teams and drags out design cycles.

Chipmind describes its agents as a new class of tools that work from a customer’s own, proprietary design data.

The agents are built to slot into existing engineering flows, learn a company’s toolchain and design hierarchy, and then carry out multi-step design and verification tasks autonomously, all while leaving final control with the human engineer. The company claims engineers can save roughly 40% of their time on routine chores.

The problem Chipmind targets is familiar to anyone who has worked in chip design: massive, customised EDA flows that simply were not built to talk to modern automation. Chipmind’s founders say they didn’t try to rip out those legacy systems.

Instead, they built a platform that prepares them for agentic automation and wraps intelligence around the existing stack.

“In the semiconductor industry, deep customisation and data protection are fundamental, but true design awareness is what separates a generic tool from an intelligent partner. Each company’s chip is a complex hierarchy with unique constraints, surrounded by a proprietary environment of tools and workflows,” said Harald Kröll, co-founder and CEO of Chipmind. 

“That is the reality we built for. Our ‘design-aware’ agents are engineered to holistically understand the entire chip context, not just the surrounding tools. We’ve found this deep awareness is the key that unlocks productivity, translating directly into significant time savings on the most complex tasks, all while integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.”

The startup’s origin is rooted in academic and industry experience. Co-founders Harald Kröll and Sandro Belfanti met at ETH Zurich during their PhDs and together have been involved in the development of more than 20 chips, from mobile modems to system-on-chip designs. Their experience, they say, exposed how much of chip engineering is precise but repetitive work.

“Anyone who’s spent time in chip development knows how much of the work is repetitive and time-consuming, demanding precision but not necessarily creativity,” said Sandro Belfanti, Co-Founder and CTO of Chipmind. 

“Throughout my career developing chips at top-tier semiconductor companies, I’ve often wished for a solution that could magically take care of those tedious tasks so I could focus on solving real engineering challenges.

“With Chipmind Agents, we’re finally bringing that solution to life: AI agents that can autonomously handle the boring parts, letting engineers focus on what truly matters: innovation.”

Chipmind’s first funding round was led by Founderful, with several semiconductor industry angels joining the table. The founders say the money will go to hiring engineers, speeding up product work and deepening relationships with strategic customers.

The launch arrives as chip design grows continually harder, demand for compute rises, design complexity increases, and simply adding headcount is not a realistic fix. Chipmind places itself as a practical bridge, a way to keep existing toolchains while automating the parts of the process that slow teams down.

Edouard Treccani, principal at Founderful, added: “In a world buzzing with AI every day, Chipmind stands out as a refreshingly real solution to a problem Harald and Sandro have spent 20 years deep in. From day one, they’ve built in close dialogue with the market, and the early feedback has been remarkably positive. Founderful is thrilled to be part of their journey!”

Chipmind is offering demos to semiconductor groups interested in testing its agents and says it will continue scaling its engineering team as it works with early customers.