Founders: Axel Scheurer & Josef Waltl
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empowering automation engineers to turn factories into software systems
Employees: 20+ & 10% Local
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $10M Raised
Investors: Insight Partners, Baukunst, Fly Ventures, First Momentum
Key Customers: Henkel, Wuerth Group
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $40M+ (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the x last fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Software Defined Automation is building an industrial DevOps platform, bringing manufacturing floors and their PLC (programmable logic controllers) further online, better connecting them to the control systems and cloud environments above so that manufacturers and capitalism can move faster. They might even help save industrial engineering.
Founder Josef Waltl started Software Defined Automation alongside Axel Scheurer in 2021 after building his career in industrial technology at Siemens & AWS. His technical fascination began at the age of fourteen, programming microcontrollers for industrial applications and laterstudying computer science & business. At Siemens he has led product management initiatives for Factory Automation Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) for Asia, as well as helped build-up their strongly US based Industrial Software Business, Soon after starting at Amazon he hired himself into a global role out of Munich building their industrial software partner ecosystem after authoring one of their infamous 6 page memos.
While at AWS, Josef watched how industrial automation partners struggled to bring cloud application-like flexibility to the manufacturing shop floor. PLCs are effectively mini computers on machines that can receive data and execute instructions, using some internal logic they have been programmed to perform. Programming is still done mostly on site with hefty Windows-based Engineering systems. Flying Automation Engineers around the world for minor changes in automation logic is still a common practice.
If you were to visualize the problem, imagine a manufacturing center that produces adhesives, like SDA’s customer Henkel. At one of Henkel’s manufacturing plants they have a fully connected second floor overlooking machines. Those machines are run by PLCs that speak a different language and must be serviced by external machine builderswhen updates or servicing is needed. That can take weeks! Leading to lost productivity and revenue.
PLCs have not historically had their own DevOps platform to help manage updates, share insights, or even handle user access. Wouldn’t that be nice to bring online?
Josef is committed to help solve a major challenge of our society. We need to produce more, especially domestically as the onshoring of manufacturing continues for cost, defense, and conveniency reasons. We lack 80M manufacturing workers globally (src) and the average age of an automation engineer is 43 (src). Less than 10% of these workers are in their 20s. This slower moving, lower paying engineering tech stack isn’t appealing to up & coming developers.
But we need the best & brightest to build the future of industrial technology. And those workers will only be able to earn as much as software developers if their tools make them as productive. Software Defined Automation, a modern DevOps platform for manufacturing engineers, is helping grease the wheels.
Businesses like Henkel implement SDA’s IT-like Backup ,Version Control for transparent code change management and Browser-based Engineering. This allows even the night shift operator to handle the 4 W’s of project management: what changed, when it changed, who changed it, and why it changed so any issues that arise can be identified, troubleshooted, and solved quickly.
SDA is built on AWS with more than 20 services, including Amazon Cognito for authentication, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 for storage, versioning, and traceability, Amazon EC2 to stream specialized engineering IDEs as well as AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon Simple Queue Service for implementing its serverless event-driven capabilities.
The ability to run PLC programming environments in a browser allows customers to maximize the utilization of licenses, access on any device, and manage user control access so that controllers in the factory can be automated & secured like the cloud did to computers in data centers.
SDA spends most of their engineering resources on cloud security. They store sensitive customer information that must be fully encrypted and lead with simplicity so that industrial & automation engineers can onboard, understand, and use their platform quickly.
Software Defined Automation has grown to a team of more than 20 employees and is focused on expanding in the U.S. in 2024 with Marketing & Sales based in Boston. The company grew revenue more than 200% in 2023 and works with a growing number of Enterprise customers.
The U.S. is their focus market for the year and they chose Boston to complement their Munich beginnings, the home of PTC, Aspen Technology, and other top industrial technology companies & educational institutions. They’re out to get the best people..and believe they are in Boston.
Operators to Know:
- Hilary Ives, Marketing
- Leo Kilfoy, VP Product
- Jason Silva, Principal Sales Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Software Defined Automation team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key milestone for 2024 as you expand into the U.S.?
- Could you share some details about the competitive landscape?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team into the growth stage?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 / / teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Software Defined Automation you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more PLC environments into the digital age. The consumer & industrial world applauds your efforts. See you around town!