Over the last five years, I have met with countless reliability engineers, facility managers, service contractors and hundreds of people who are responsible for the systems around us upon which we rely. Time and time again, I am met with a similar message: modern maintenance technology is largely inaccessible to the masses. We often take for granted just how much work goes into keeping the air cool and the hot water running. But in the absence of modern technology that is affordable to the teams who keep the lights on, this is becoming increasingly harder to do.
Accelerating Human Productivity – And Safety
In a time where the majority of people are connected to the internet, innovations in connectivity and sensor technologies are rapidly enabling machines and devices to come online as well. While the internet has changed the way we relate to each other and understand the world, an even more rapid and significant form of innovation is emerging for the industrial machines that we use on a daily basis.
At Augury, we are combining two key shifts in the industry: Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things. The intersection of these trends allows us to provide machines with the ability and awareness to optimize their own health and productivity. This helps machines become even more reliable and self-sufficient, which will greatly enhance and accelerate human productivity and safety.
Bringing Predictive Maintenance To The Masses
There is little dispute that in the machine maintenance industry, Predictive Maintenance (PdM) has been shown to be vastly more efficient than reactive or even preventive strategies. PdM has been implemented for over 30 years, but has not yet extended beyond high-end markets. Currently only 12% of commercial and industrial facilities have a PdM program. Our goal at Augury is to bring the remaining 88% up to speed. By introducing smart sensors and cloud-based computing to the industry, we are making PdM more cost-effective and accessible, allowing it to trickle down into new markets.
At the crux of who we are and what we do is our proprietary machine learning algorithms. We are building out a massive database of mechanical data, organized by classifications of machine sounds correlated to what they indicate about machine health. Finding commonalities between the samples allows us to train the algorithm to identify similar issues in subsequent recordings. Therefore, the more data from machine readings that we feed into the algorithms, the smarter and more sophisticated Augury’s mechanical diagnostics capabilities become. Over the last year, we have grown our malfunction dictionary by 5,000% and are well on our way to having the largest data-base in the world.
Empowering People To Extend The Life Of Machines
These diagnostics capabilities are the beating heart of Augury, enabling us to empower technicians and engineers with the ability to really listen to and understand industrial machines in unprecedented ways. This will increase the reliability and extend the lives of industrial equipment, effectively modernizing industrial maintenance practices. This, in turn, will allow each of us to trust the machines on which our lives depend. Reduced outages, less downtime and consistent support for the ebb and flow of modern life.
The implications of such progress do not stop at the industrial market. Augury’s mechanical diagnostics will have a major impact on consumer markets as well. With our vision of “Augury everywhere,” your car, garage door and even your washing machine can have the ability to communicate with you to let you know what it needs to keep functioning efficiently. As machines around us become smarter and more autonomous, we will grow to expect more from them. We will expect them to be aware of their mechanical condition – to have a central nervous system. This is our goal at Augury – to ensure that every machine is aware of its mechanical health and will be able to avoid breakdowns. We are building the mechanical nervous system of the Internet of Things (IoT), starting with the industrial and commercial facilities markets.
Growing To Become Better
In order to reach these goals, there is much to be done. Our most recent round of funding is a significant milestone in the path we are paving at Augury. This boost of capital will enable us to grow our sales and marketing efforts, forge new partnerships, engage with more enterprise customers, install more continuous diagnostics systems on more machines and ultimately, feed more data to our ever-growing malfunction dictionary. In short, the more we grow, the better our products become.
Outside of Augury, we look to the market for new ways to collaborate and come together as a society to help drive global progress. Open APIs, industry standardization and interoperability are all necessary in order to bring such innovation to new markets. As more machines come online, we will need to know that our equipment and electronics will alert us when something isn’t right. We at Augury, are doing our part to help us establish this long, enduring trust.
If you want to play an active role in the future of connected machines, join us.
