
Hamburg-based startup PANDA GmbH, which specializes in enabling industrial factory floors for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, reports the successful completion of a financing round of around half a million EUR. The main operating facility will be relocated to Schleswig-Holstein.
Investors are MBG Mittelständische Beteiligungsgesellschaft Schleswig-Holstein mbH and five business angels from Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Lower Saxony. As part of the capital increase, PANDA has relocated its main operating facility from Hamburg to Norderstedt in Schleswig-Holstein. The already profitable company will use the fresh capital to handle further new business and continue to grow. Investors from the Baltic Business Angels Schleswig-Holstein e.V. (BBA-SH) circle alone have now invested more than EUR 1.5 million over several financing rounds.
Ingo Kaiser, managing partner and founder of the company, is pleased about the continued trust of investors and the growth prospects thus offered: „It is remarkable that a medium-sized investment company participates ‚openly‘, i.e. with equity instead of loans or convertible loans, in early-stage startups to such an extent.“ This documents that PANDA is obviously on the right track with its business model, he said. Georg Banner from the Schleswig-Holstein MBG commented that in the future it will participate even more than before with equity in promising target companies.
PANDA digitizes machine, camera and sensor data using its own open source-based software and hardware, which it also developed itself, and makes the data obtained directly from the machines available to AI applications. This is done in a way that allows algorithms to start learning from this data immediately. Expensive and time-consuming additional data engineering becomes unnecessary with PANDA. Industry costs for classic industrial AI applications such as automated quality management, predictive maintenance, root cause analysis or automated machine monitoring could be reduced by more than half in some cases with PANDA’s tools, Kaiser explained. The beneficiaries are AI solution providers, system houses, and machine and plant manufacturers, in addition to the industry, which, notwithstanding the current AI hype, is still rather reluctant to introduce AI applications for cost reasons.