Operations1 raises $12.5 million in Series A funding

Press release 01/31/2022

Series A financing round

Operations1, the cloud software company for adaptive employee-led production processes, today announced it has raised $12.5 million in its Series A funding round. The investment, which was led by OpenOcean, a European venture capital firm, will support Operations1 to double its team size, expand internationally, and invest further in product development. 

The Operations1 software provides the solution to ensure long-term resilience of industrial operations in today’s complex environment. The platform provides processual knowledge, gathers real time data, and automates time-consuming administrative tasks across operational workflows.

co-founders-operations1-cioplenu-daniel-anian-benjamin

A long-awaited solution to bolster industrial resilience

Covid-19 has shown that companies must adapt to change more than ever. However, there are fundamental trends beyond Covid-19 that challenge the resilience of manufacturers around the world. While the competitive pressure on industrial companies is rising from increasing customer requirements for product individualisation and seamless documentation, the access to skilled labour becomes increasingly challenging and complex processes are crashing due to the scarcity of skilled labour.

While time-consuming administrative tasks get automated, the cloud-based processual knowledge helps to perform value-adding activities, and data gathered on the spot of process execution can, in turn, be used to optimise the maintenance, quality, assembly or audit processes. Companies therefore build up resilience, as they become more flexible and continuously improve the way they operate.

In addition to resilience, Operations1 customers benefit from improved and efficient processes. For example, customers Bosch, ThyssenKrupp and Trumpf, have already benefited from efficiency gains of up to 20% and up to 55% error rate reductions. 

Benjamin Brockmann

Co-CEO benjamin.brockmann@operations1.com

“With many manufacturing companies still using paperwork in production today, it comes as no surprise they are struggling to compete against digital-savvy competitors as it blocks the possibility of making data-based decisions for continuous improvements. At Operations1 we empower operational workers and the company through intuitive, highly flexible software that can help navigate the turbulent and ever-changing challenges ahead.

“We are delighted to begin the year with such an exciting announcement and can look back on the previous year today having tripled the revenue and having won a large number of medium-sized companies, as well as two major DAX companies who will be relying on Operations1 for the long term.”

Tom Henriksson

General Partner at OpenOcean VC

“In the coming years the industrial sector will be the next to experience competitive advantage from digitisation. Operations1 is a pioneer in this space by enabling continuous, data-based process innovation. We are very happy to support the founders and the fantastic team in their mission.”

Cherry Ventures, 42 Cap, and top-tier business angels also participate in the round

In addition to OpenOcean, the Operations1 team was able to attract top-class business angels. Among others, Kulpreet Singh, former Managing Director at UiPath, and Michael Füllemann, former President and Chairman at Schindler and Senior Partner at BCG, also support the team as advisors. The previous investors Cherry Ventures from Berlin and 42cap from Munich also joined the round.

Christian Meermann

Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures

“The software market for the 'Deskless Workforce' is gigantic. In the DACH area alone, we estimate the market at around 10 million potential software users. The Operations1 team is ideally positioned to develop into a global leader."

Our investors