The Machine Whisperers: This Startup Improves Machine Health Through Digital Transformation
Various predictive and preventive maintenance methods for industrial machinery have been around for a long while now. The newest technology disrupting this mix, though, revolves around continuous diagnostics and didn’t get its start on the manufacturing floor. It came instead out of the medical devices world.
Gal Shaul is one of two co-founders and CTO of Augury, an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) company focused on production machine health. Years ago, while he was working as a software developer of a medical device startup, he was visiting a client’s site to understand why their product wasn’t functioning properly. When he arrived, Gal could hear right away that the machine’s cooling fan was clogged. That got him thinking about monitoring the sounds machines make to prevent failures. That episode eventually led him to partner with his fellow co-founder and CEO, Saar Yoskovitz, who was working on machine learning solutions for speech recognition at the time, to launch Augury in 2011. Their goal was to develop hardware and software, combining Artificial Intelligence and the IIoT, to improve reliability within the manufacturing industry based in part on the sounds that machinery makes.