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From infrastructure and factories to warehouses and amusement parks, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are a driving force behind society’s built world. These computerized brains also sit within the larger Operations Technology (OT) arena, one which despite its outsized impact on our physical world, has seen less attention paid toward innovation.
Copia Automation is ushering in this much-needed modernization in the form of DevOps tools for industrial control engineers, think “Github for Industrial Controls Systems.” Founder Adam Gluck couldn’t be better suited to lead this charge. From his experience as a founding engineer at Uber, where he built productivity tools for developers, to his upbringing in America’s industrial heart (the Midwest), Adam brings true grit and personal passion to his role as CEO.
Ironspring is proud to announce we have partnered with Copia Automation by syndicating into a $16.4 million Series A round. Alongside lead investor Lux Capital (Bilal Zuberi), Ironspring Ventures was the only venture fund investor to join the round outside of existing investor Construct Capital (Dayna Grayson). Other notable angel investors in the round include: Jeff Wilke, Former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer; Jason Warner, Managing Director at Redpoint & former CTO at Github; Alex Estevez, Venture Partner at Accel & former CFO at Atlassian; Qasar Younis, Founder & CEO at Applied Intuition & former COO at Y Combinator.
This world-class syndicate of investors will give Copia the capital and industrial expertise to expand its commercial reach as it grows across multiple sectors and industries. Ty will be observing the board of director meetings for Copia.
We initially were introduced to Adam and Copia through Bilal (Lux), who is one of our go-to partners on all things digital industrial innovation. His recommendation to get to know them early set off a great relationship where we could bring the value of our thematic industrial focus and network to bear long before financing was ever discussed – just like we like it!
As mentioned previously, Copia is creating developer tools (DevOps) specifically geared toward industrial machines and automation engineers. The company’s first product is a source control DevOps tool that allows for GIT-based revision for PLC-focused programming (i.e. source control at the file directory level). Copia’s platform contains a multitude of features and controls that allow these software engineers to collaborate more seamlessly, track/audit previous work more easily, and deploy new updates and improvements at faster speeds. Copia’s product provides direct support for the major PLC programming environments of Siemens®, Rockwell Automation®, and CODESYS®.
“Copia provides unique benefit as a tool that is tailor-made for control engineers, and enables workflows that previously were impossible for most automation teams,” according to Copia user John Sullivan, Project Director at DMC Engineering, a major system integrator in the manufacturing space.
As part of the $168 billion industrial control systems market, Copia has an opportunity to upend PLC-related processes across almost all industrial verticals including automotive, electronics, food and beverage, and consumer goods. All of these sectors lose a collective
$647B annually to global industrial downtime. Copia is well positioned to capture this value as it leverages the capital from this Series A financing to press the gas on its sales and marketing efforts.
On a related note, the larger OT space also has been witness to growing security threats that jeopardize enterprises, municipalities, governments, and more. IoT/OT security spending is expected to reach $3.8 billion in 2021, expanding at a notable 23.8% CAGR to $7.2B in 2024. With this increased spending comes a clear opportunity for early-stage disrupters, like Copia, whose features surrounding auditable code history provide a clear example of increased security.
Adam and his team truly encompass the best of technical expertise alongside thoughtfulness, integrity, and creativity. We could not be more excited to be a part of this rocket ship company as it scales and transforms the way in which we power the world’s industrial machinery.
Copia Automation Website: https://www.copia.io/
Copia Automation Hiring: https://angel.co/company/copia-automation/jobs
Press Release: Copia Automation Raises $16.4M in Funding to Bring DevOps Efficiencies to Industrial Automation
