BrightAI raises $51M to ease infrastructure maintenance with AI

BrightAI Inc., a startup using artificial intelligence to help companies maintain physical assets, today announced that it has closed a $51 million funding round. 

Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital led the Series A investment. They were joined by BoxGroup, Marlinspike, Rsquared VC, Cooley VSC Ventures and other backers. BrightAI says that the cash infusion follows a year in which its annualized revenue topped $100 million.

Identifying the cause of malfunctions in physical assets such as 5G base stations often requires reviewing a significant amount of technical data. In some cases, companies must also dispatch technicians to gather additional information. BrightAI has developed a software platform called Stateful that it says can streamline the task.

The platform makes it possible to collect data about distant physical assets with drones. According to BrightAI, customers can use Stateful-powered quadcopters to examine infrastructure that requires frequent inspections. Fixed-wing drones, which have a longer range, may be used to monitor assets such as overhead power lines.

Stateful also lends itself to inspecting water pipelines. BrightAI provides a Stateful-integrated sensor suite for pipeline robots, specialized machines that can travel inside a pipe to collect maintenance data.

Companies can enrich the information they collect using robots with data from sensors embedded in their physical assets. Furthermore, Stateful can connect to cameras on technicians’ helmets. The platform uses artificial intelligence to provide technicians with pointers on what information to collect.

Stateful streams the data points it gathers about an asset to the cloud, where it assembles them into a digital twin. This is a virtual replica of a system that technicians can study to find potential malfunctions. According to BrightAI, Stateful uses AI to automate some of the work involved in identifying errors.

Alongside its core observability features, the company provides a dispatching tool for field service teams. It can be used to prioritize support tickets by urgency and assign each one to the technician with the most relevant skills. Technicians have access to an app that displays data about the system they have been tasked with repairing.

BrightAI says that Stateful has been deployed at more than 50,000 customer locations to date. The software helps technicians monitor over 250,000 assets including HVAC systems, power transmission infrastructure and factory equipment.

BrightAI will use the proceeds from its funding round to hire more than 100 new employees. The staffers are set to join its engineering, operations and go-to-market teams. The company also plans to open a new headquarters in San Francisco.

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