Amper had to rotate to regain its footing. Founded in 2016 with the goal of creating a smart circuit breaker for the house, the firm had to assess their market position — or lack thereof. With a grin, co-founder and CEO Akshat Thirani explains, “We got into HAX with that premise, and then absolutely invalidated it.” “We were in a state of uncertainty for a few weeks.” Based on the home energy statistics we’ve seen, we realized there was a lot behind electricity. Shenzhen was my destination. Everything suddenly came together, and a new firm was established.”
Thirani claims he was inspired by his childhood in India, where he came from a family of factory owners for numerous generations. The team built a mechanism to assist drag manufacturing into the twenty-first century after forming in Chicago, where its founders attended Northwestern University. Amper’s technology is essentially a plug-and-play upgrade for production machinery. To measure energy flow, the little boxes plug into the wall and clamp on to the machine’s cable. It may then extrapolate important data such as output and if the system is online.
Thirani says, “We ship out this DTC box.” “It’s like a self-installed DTC kit.” Installing it on any PC takes roughly 10 minutes. Our growth engine has been that. We just give it away for free, allowing others to test the product. We’ve been conducting remote sales solely from that early product-fit stage.” The equipment then takes about a week to completely calibrate. After that onboarding time, all essential information, including the machine’s health and the amount of components it produces, is available in a single dashboard. The insights it gathers aren’t as profound as those gained from a new machine with built-in sensors, but that’s a tradeoff that comes with the ease of installation and low cost. It effectively lowers the entrance hurdle for digitizing current factory systems.
Following a $3.5 million seed round, Foundation Capital, Corazon Capital, Slow Ventures, SOSV, Converge VC, and GTMfund today announced an $11 million Series A round managed by Lewis & Clark Ventures. The money will be used to expand the team from just under 20 members to more than 50 in the coming years. It will also be utilized to sell existing products and conduct future research and development.
“Manufacturing is enormous,” Thirani says. “You want to create consumer-oriented items that are available to a variety of producers.” I remember having this conversation with my father about how you had to talk to salespeople and consultants if you wanted to acquire any form of technology. I had this idea that you should be able to go to a website, buy anything, know precisely how much it costs, and have the same expectations that we have as customers.”
