Stanford-StartX Fund has backed the electronics manufacturing management software developer, with the proceeds going to product development.
Instrumental, a US-based manufacturing operations software developer, has collected $20m of series B funding from investors including Stanford-StartX Fund, the venture unit aligned to Stanford University’s StartX accelerator.
Canaan Partners led the round and was also joined by Eclipse Ventures, Root Ventures and First Round Capital.
Founded in 2015, Instrumental has built an algorithm-driven software platform that helps engineers and operations staff supervise the condition of produce from manufacturing plants.
Instrumental pitches its software to sectors such as consumer electronics where excess materials are wasted because of faulty units and obstacles during development can cause serious delays. The series B funding is expected to drive product development.
Details of Instrumental’s series A round could not be confirmed, although the company issued $25,000 in options for equity funding in July 2019.
Anna-Katrina Sheldetsky, founder and chief executive of Instrumental, said: “Instrumental’s goal is to close the loop between hardware design and engineering teams and what’s happening on the factory floor by giving teams a way to discover, analyse and fix issues – from anywhere in the world.
“”As a product design lead at Apple, a system like Instrumental would have saved me countless hours and saved the company many millions of dollars.”