Somerville, Massachusetts-based manufacturing app platform company Tulip has announced it has raised $18.4 million in Series B funding led by Vertex Ventures US. NEA and Pitango Ventures also participated in this round. With this new funding round, Tulip will be expanding its product, engineering, and sales teams.
“We’re excited to partner with Tulip,” said Vertex Ventures US partner and new Tulip board member Sandeep Bhadra in a statement. “The manufacturing workforce has been left behind by technology. In the same way that workflow software from Salesforce and Atlassian have made sales and engineering teams agile, Tulip’s shop floor management apps supercharge factory production teams,”
Leading manufacturers like Jabil, Dentsply, Kohler, New Balance, and Nautique are all customers of Tulip. Frontline engineers for these companies use Tulip in their factories from the bottom up, which has helped increase yield, improve quality, and accelerate process improvements.
“Tulip’s growth over the past few years has redefined the possibilities of Industry 4.0. We’ve launched manufacturing’s first platform-as-a-service and shown a strong return on investment for our customers. We’re arming the rebels – the manufacturing engineers who want to change how they work by using digital tools,” added Tulip co-founder and CEO Natan Linder. “We’re extremely proud of our team. We’re excited to see our customers grow, and we couldn’t have asked for better partners to continue scaling Tulip. Vertex Ventures US, NEA, and Pitango share our vision and drive to revolutionize the way manufacturing works. Together, we’re empowering engineers on the shop floor with the tools they need to truly improve their factories with data-driven decisions.”
Last year, Tulip launched the industry’s first quick-start IIoT kit called Factory Kit. And the company also launched the manufacturing’s first app library, which is a growing list of apps for getting started. Plus Tulip also announced a strategic alliance with Bosch and a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Plus the company also set up a device ecosystem with a growing list of devices that are compatible with Tulip’s shop floor IoT solution out of the box.
Dayna Grayson, the partner at NEA who led Tulip’s Series A round, pointed out that his team has been Tulip from the start. Grayson said that she was “drawn to the company’s ability to scale sales in a SaaS-like fashion and to create productivity directly on the shop floor.”
Tulip saw 400% growth in 2018 with customers spread across 14 countries. The company also has more than 50 employees across their headquarters in Somerville and offices in Europe. Tulip is expecting to more than double the headcount by the end of the year. And there will be more of a focus on R&D, customer success, sales, and marketing.
