We are delighted to announce that Molten has led the $10m Series A funding round in Zaptic, the UK-headquartered, frontline operations platform for global manufacturing companies.
The investment will be used to continue Zaptic’s growth, expand into new markets and new verticals, and further develop its no-code platform, which is helping manufacturers bridge the ongoing skills gap and digitise daily operations in a way that closes the data loop and brings in application of AI in factories. Zaptic seeks to address these challenges with speed, ease and content rich adoption enabling insight with the tightest alignment of machine and human data to maximise output by frontline workers. Zaptic delivers that through guided workflow - operator assistance at task level - no code platform that aligns human and machine reference data for context specificity, closing the loop intelligently between human activity and assets, for maximum machine learning insight and adaptation.
Today, leading manufacturers such as Carlsberg, Hovis, Berry Global and Celgard, use Zaptic as part of their transformation activities, digitising operations for frontline teams and accelerating operational excellence journeys. The company’s vision is to be the operating system for frontline execution, with insight and best practices shared within and across companies, raising standards and improving workforce productivity across supply chains.
Molten Ventures is leading the latest round of investment, with existing investors also participating. Zaptic has previously raised $6m from investors such as Chalfen VC and Backed VC across several seed rounds. Molten will join Zaptic’s Board of Directors as part of the deal. In a highly competitive and changing market, manufacturers need to enable their workforce to flex across new equipment, processes, and products. Neither traditional learning & development approaches, nor legacy Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), can keep pace with the speed of operational change. Workers need on the job assistance in knowing what to do, when to do it and how best to do it at the point of use. Zaptic’s unique ‘no-code’, drag and drop functionality, coupled with its approach to data hierarchies offers maximum simplicity and actionable insight to ensure productivity, efficiency, and savings.
Zaptic’s simplicity and ease of use has allowed clients to complete over 3 million tasks in the platform in 2022 alone, driving savings from 10%+ in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) improvement and reducing down time by up to 20%. Zaptic and Molten Ventures will work together to scale Zaptic’s solution with an addressable market of 700 million industrial workers, across global supply chains. The long-term vision for Zaptic is to be the Microsoft for frontline workers and to be the operating system for factory workers across industries. The short-term roadmap for 2023 includes expanding knowledge management enhancements, skills management investments, enhancements to the core product, predictive insights, and wearables & augmented reality.
Richard Milnes, Chief Executive Officer of Zaptic, said: “We are seeing huge demand from manufacturers looking for solutions to help them transform their operations in the face of increasing pressures and a worsening skills gap. This investment from Molten Ventures will allow us to scale our business to meet that demand and continue to invest deeply into creating an operational knowledge layer for workers, with operational data enabled by AI.”
Nelly Markova, Principal at Molten Ventures, said: “Zaptic is addressing one of the biggest challenges facing industrial companies today in a really smart way. By digitising processes and making knowledge more accessible to frontline workers, Zaptic is helping manufacturers significantly improve productivity, reduce waste and better meet customer demands. We’re excited to support the team’s vision for transforming industrial workplaces.”