Thai startup helping factories get efficient secures funding

When Sittikorn Nualrod was working as a manufacturing standards consultant, he saw lots of factories “still working on paper and very old versions of software,” he says.

That led to inefficiencies in their processes – particularly downtime from broken machinery because engineers were failing to do regular maintenance and spot machines that were starting to malfunction.

That prompted Nualrod, 31, to establish his first startup.

Photo credit: 123RF

With System Stone, the Thai entrepreneur is offering a manufacturing monitoring service that uses a mix of software and hardware to keep factory machines maintained and running properly.

Its Bangkok-based team has just received an undisclosed amount of funding from Expara, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Singapore, Nualrod tells Tech in Asia. This pre-series A investment is the third injection, after getting cash from angel investors and True InCube incubator.

Rage against the broken machine

Since starting mid-2016, System Stone has grown to 60 corporate customers who pay for subscriptions of US$300 for 1,700 factory-floor engineers. Around 50,000 pieces of machinery are being monitored.

Ninety-five percent of its clients are in Thailand, while the rest are in neighboring Myanmar.

System Stone co-founder and CEO Sittikorn Nualrod in front of one of his startup’s promo posters / Photo credit: System Stone

Its biggest customer base is made up of food and beverage plants, followed by automotive factories. One big-name user is Oishi, the Philippine snack food company perhaps best known for its chips that has facilities in Thailand.

Nualrod’s startup makes money from its annual subscriptions for each engineer, though revenues are not disclosed. That gives access to its mobile app and data dashboard. It also sells one type of hardware, which measures machine vibrations in order to detect abnormalities. But the hardware is not mandatory, since the software service has an open application programming interface that works with an array of monitoring gizmos.

There’s also a free side to the app, which Nualrod explains can be used by any factory-floor employee to report a machine issue to their supervising engineer.

Eyeing expansion

This type of service, known as a computerized maintenance management system or CMMS, can be applied to all kinds of industries and workplaces – from salmon farms and office buildings to tire factories. On the manufacturing side of things, France’s Mobility Work and Canada’s Fiix are arguably the closest analogs to System Stone.