Helsinki-based industrial AI startup Rotomate has secured €2.1 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Kvanted, with participation from Robin Capital, Angel Invest, Business Finland, and some notable angel investors including Jiri Heinonen and Moaffak Ahmed. The company develops software that analyzes machine and maintenance data from industrial plants to help reliability teams assess equipment issues and prioritize maintenance actions. The platform combines real-time operational data with historical maintenance records to generate analyses and recommendations for plant operators. The new funding will be used to further develop the product, hire additional staff, and support expansion into European industrial markets, including Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland.
Founded in 2024, Rotomate is tackling a structural mismatch at the heart of industrial reliability. Over the past decades, industrial plants have invested heavily in sensors and condition monitoring systems designed to catch developing faults early. Yet while the volume of machine data has scaled exponentially, the number of specialists who can interpret it has not. Most monitoring tools still stop at the alert, leaving a human expert to manually decide which warnings matter, while a single critical machine failure during an eight-hour shift can cost an industrial plant close to €1 million in lost output.
“Improving uptime and industrial reliability has an enormous potential in almost any industrial plant or factory, and it is bottlenecked not by data but by human attention,” says Mikko Kuusisto, co-founder and CEO of Rotomate. “We built Rotomate to scale that expertise, so that every plant can act on the most up-to-date data around the clock.”
Rotomate’s AI colleague continuously analyzes plant data, drawing on maintenance history and operational context to mimic the reasoning of a senior specialist. Where conventional monitoring tools stop at an alert, Rotomate delivers a full analysis report explaining what is causing the issue, what the recommended action is, and why. This reduces manual monitoring time by up to 83% and makes expert-level analysis available across every machine in the plant.
“Most existing condition monitoring software stops at alerts. Experts go further. Software should too,” says Dr. Jesse Miettinen, co-founder and CTO of Rotomate. “Our product marks the transition from expert-driven processes to scalable maintenance systems delivering expert decisions.”
Rotomate works with industrial customers whose sites together represent more than €35 billion in annual production, including leading process industry companies such as Metsä Group, SSAB, and Aurubis. The team has grown from two to ten people over the past year, with a global commercial pipeline anchored in Northern and Western Europe, including Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.
Co-founder Mikko Kuusisto was an early employee at Swappie, where he played a core role in scaling the company from its first €1M to €220M in revenue. Co-founder Jesse Miettinen pioneered AI research in condition monitoring at Aalto University before founding Rotomate. Several other team members hold PhDs in mechanical engineering and industrial AI. With the new funding, Rotomate plans to grow the team further, with open positions spanning engineering, product, and commercial roles to support its international expansion.
“European factories are sitting on years of machine data they don’t have the specialist capacity to act on, and the cost shows up as unplanned downtime and lost output. Rotomate solves that bottleneck head-on by scaling expert-level reasoning to every machine in the plant, not just the ones a reliability engineer has time to review. That is exactly the kind of applied AI European industry needs right now. We’re proud to lead this round,” says Eerik Paasikivi, General Partner at Kvanted.
The pre-seed round also includes a group of notable angel investors such as Moaffak Ahmed as well as Accel through its scout program.
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/rotomate-raises-e2-1m-pre-seed/
