Celebrating a Major Milestone in Our Journey

I’m delighted to share the news of our $37 million Series B funding round, led by Salesforce Ventures, with Schneider Electric Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Stepstone, Inspired, Amplo, and other returning investors. This $64 million of total capital raised represents a significant milestone as a testament to the amazing work of our teams, customers, investors, and partners. I want to share my deep appreciation and gratitude for everyone who has been part of our journey so far - and thought I’d share some thoughts on how we reached this point & our mission going forward.

Building the Future of American Manufacturing

For American manufacturers, quality is increasingly the competitive edge that determines whether products win on the global stage. Quality is the voice of the customer and their unmet needs. It is the strategic asset that helps every function - from marketing to supply chain to new production introductions - know what the top issues are that customers are facing, and how to respond. 

Manufacturers who can rapidly understand customer needs and react to them with product updates & new product introductions can create a flywheel of high-performing products customers love, where insights from distribution become a competitive advantage. Today, as supply chains are being reconfigured, production costs are rising, and geopolitical uncertainty is pushing companies to rethink where and how they build. In this new world, AI is how the U.S. regains a strategic advantage. The reality is that for most manufacturers, that flywheel is broken today, and represents a significant opportunity for those who can harness it.

From Industry Challenges to Axion’s Mission

I founded Axion in response to what we were seeing in the manufacturing industry. AI was solving lots of problems for software engineers, but there was a significant gap between what AI was achieving in certain domains and what enterprises actually needed. When strategic new product launches happened, enterprises lacked a clear view of the top issues impacting their customers, resulting in failed launches, downtime, cost of poor quality, and 1-star reviews. Astonishingly, across the industry globally, $3 trillion slips through the cracks each year.  

Aerospace manufacturers were great at aerospace engineering, and medical device manufacturers were great at medical device engineering. But in the world of big data, they simply did not have the tools to be able to sift through myriads of information streams to understand what issues were happening on their strategic products. Instead of solving customer issues, quality & engineering teams were spending all day with 15 tabs open on their computers, trying to figure out what the day’s new issue was, or whether the major quality issue from last month was scoped and solved.

This insight became the foundation of Axion’s mission: to transform how manufacturers solve their customers’ product issues and improve product quality. We’ve built a human-in-the-loop AI platform that unifies data and incorporates engineering expertise from humans. The platform provides early warning signals and helps enterprises detect, investigate, and resolve quality issues before they impact more customers, enabling manufacturers to respond faster and more intelligently to real-world problems.

Through our work with customers such as Cummins, Medtronic, Boeing, RTX, SharkNinja, and many more, we’ve been able to help teams significantly improve investigation, detection, and response times - resulting in 7-8 figure ROI for many customers in reduced warranty costs and accelerated product innovation cycles.

A Customer-Centric Era of Manufacturing

Overall, when all functions are learning about customer issues at the earliest warning signal and using this knowledge to align their actions, we call this customer-centric product development. Axion has become an operating system for innovation. The customer issues in the platform are used beyond quality to empower marketing, software engineering, product strategy, product design, supply chain, and customer experience. We’re helping companies in industries ranging from data centres to aerospace, medtech, automotive, and consumer manufacturing understand what their customers truly need and transform how they design, build, and bring their products to market. What used to be lagging indicators are becoming leading indicators to increase reliability and availability, build better products, and deliver world-class customer experiences. 

We were proud to hear from investors during the Series B raise how Axion’s customers attested to achieving multi-million dollar ROI in the first weeks of using the platform.

Our Series B allows us to accelerate our own product development, expand our AI capabilities and support more manufacturers as they seek to develop high-quality, reliable products at scale. Salesforce Ventures’ investment specifically brings a unique synergy, unlocking the ability for our customers to unify customer issue response across their Salesforce ecosystems, connecting field engineering, service cloud, and data cloud assets for a 360° approach to problem-solving. There are strong synergies with Schneider Electric Ventures, too, given their focus on sustainability and resource efficiency across their portfolio. 

Our all-star team has achieved incredible things so far. We look forward to working closely with our partners to create a new golden age of American manufacturing, accelerated & more customer-centric, with AI.

• Read the Series B Funding Press Release here

• See the exclusive from Axios here

• Check out our careers page here

Learn more about what our investors learned when they talked to our customers:

• How Cummins and Axion work together to redefine uptime, warranty performance, and proactive customer support   

• How Axion helps SharkNinja detect customer issues earlier, respond faster and smarter and build better products that delight customers