Cumulus Digital Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Internet of Tools startup, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Cumulus’ platform makes industrial facilities safer, cleaner, and more productive. This round of funding was led by Brick & Mortar Ventures. Shell Ventures and Castor Ventures also participated in this round.
Known for spinning out of Shell’s Cambridge technology center known as Shell TechWorks, Cumulus connects workers, tools, and data to a cloud-hosted software platform to better manage maintenance and construction workflows.
Cumulus’ flagship product is known as the Smart Torque System (STS). The Smart Torque System (STS) improves productivity and work quality during safety-critical industrial bolting activities. STS includes the cloud-hosted Cumulus Control Center and a tablet application called TorqueFit —- which communicates with Bluetooth-enabled digital tools in the field.
“Manual work at industrial sites has not changed significantly in the last 50 years,” said Matthew Kleiman co-founder and CEO Matthew Kleiman. “Cumulus is transforming maintenance and construction with unprecedented data transparency at the individual worker level. We are collecting and analyzing data that has not existed before today.”
STS is operational at six facilities in the United States, Canada, and Singapore. And it has more than 50 sites on six continents in the deployment pipeline.
The STS has been demonstrated to reduce data review and quality assurance costs by as much as 60% and it reduces downtime costs through a better than 99% pass rate during leak testing.
Cumulus collects data from digitally-enabled tools in the field in order to provide a single source of insights for real-time quality assurance and progress tracking. And Cumulus replaces the need for expensive and time-consuming inspections to verify the quality and duration of tasks with software and tools that improve accountability and speed.
“Cumulus empowers managers with real-time insight into who completed the work, how long it took them to do it, and how well it was done,” added Cumulus co-founder and president Mark Litke. “This creates an objective and transparent medium of communication between service providers and facility owners.”
Brick & Mortar Ventures Principal Curtis Rodgers Cumulus is a great chance to formally partner with Shell Ventures as co-investors and corporate innovators. And Shell Ventures VP Geert van de Wouw pointed out that Cumulus embodies Shell’s pioneering innovation organizations and offers immediate value to Shell assets and optimizes the last manual mile of industrial and manufacturing workflows.
