BrightAI Awakens the Physical World
Upfront's Investment in Critical Infrastructure Technology
The infrastructure built to improve our environment is aging, inefficient, and struggling to meet the demands of modern life. Roads, pipelines, power grids, and other critical systems break down faster than we can repair or replace them, and we operate them well beyond their intended lifespans.
Power utilities face growing pressure to reduce outages while extreme climate events place new challenges on outdated systems. Water pipelines leak millions of gallons every day, wasting an increasingly scarce resource while municipalities and service companies scramble to repair the pipes. HVAC systems in millions of homes are pushed to their limits, often breaking down when families need them most.
The challenges impact our daily lives. And yet, in many industries, the labor needed to inspect, maintain, and repair these systems is becoming harder to find.
A Growing Labor Crisis
Infrastructure maintenance has long relied on skilled technicians and field workers to deliver reliable performance of our critical systems. Unfortunately, the workforce that looks after this technology and our built world is aging, too. The baby boomers who make up most of the labor force are hitting retirement age, and younger generations didn’t enter these industries at the same rate. The trend continues today.
Labor shortages force these companies to do more with fewer people. From water to power to waste management and more, infrastructure companies across the country are desperately trying to monitor, improve, and maintain their systems. They don’t have the people to do it, and their customers feel the pain.
I’ve written about the impact labor shortages are having on infrastructure companies before. More than ever, CEOs of these massive companies are turning to robots to evolve their business models and hopefully, maintain their critical operations.
A Technological Tipping Point
The good news is that recent advances in edge computing, AI, and communications infrastructure have opened the door to a transformation.
Edge computing can bring sophisticated AI models directly to devices at the frontlines of infrastructure management. Multimodal sensors gather data from the physical world, and new inference models can interpret that data at the edge to provide real-time insights and automation. Satellites, LoRa, and other new communication platforms unlock greater connectivity and access to infrastructure sensing and monitoring in even the most remote locations.
Customer desperation for solutions to their labor issues coinciding with technology advancements in robotics and edge computing create an unprecedented opportunity to rethink our infrastructure. Enter BrightAI.
BrightAI, the Infrastructure AI company
BrightAI is tackling some of our oldest and most critical problems using the newest advancements in edge computing and autonomy. They partner with the world’s largest organizations in HVAC, water pipeline repair, pest control, power lines, gas compression, waste management, and more. With 250,000+ AI endpoints deployed across 25,000+ locations, they are already making 100M+ predictions about the state of our national infrastructure annually.
BrightAI leads this charge by delivering hardware and software that transform our infrastructure into proactively monitored digital systems. Their flagship platform, Stateful OS, provides customers with three deployed modalities that can meet a variety of field and operational requirements.
Out-of-the-box sensors can be deployed and integrated in minutes for 24/7 monitoring to produce fully automated real-time insights about the state of infrastructure sites and assets.
Workforce wearables and AI copilots can give over-burdened labor forces the operations knowledge graphs and interactive AI that improves the quality of their work and their quality of life.
Advanced robots can automate labor-intensive or dangerous work, often better than their human counterparts.
The whole system is underpinned by a foundational infrastructure AI model, a cloud and edge computing platform called Stateful OS, and a library of edge AI models and knowledge graphs that can be deployed across sectors to serve varying customer use cases and requirements.
Customer Value Creation
This isn’t just AI for AI’s sake. It’s practical and useful technology designed with customer needs in mind.
Take Azuria Water Solutions, for example. Before adopting BrightAI’s solution, Azuria would rely on trained technicians using remote-controlled vehicles with onboard CCTV feeds to repair pipes. Now, technicians can drop fully autonomous systems in the pipes – sometimes several in different locations – to complete the repairs.
BrightAI didn’t just hand over sensor payloads to improve the technician’s CCTV feed or computer vision AI to help identify pipe anomalies. They embedded themselves in the field to understand Azuria’s workflows, co-create solutions, and most importantly, unlock top- and bottom-line value. The solution that Azuria and BrightAI developed together on Stateful OS has the potential to rehabilitate water pipelines autonomously, improve Azuria’s labor force utilization, and deliver better results to the municipalities and residents who depend on this water pipeline infrastructure.
BrightAI doesn’t just sell tools. Their end-to-end product suite unlocks lower costs, higher quality service, and greater reliability for its customers. Drones inspecting power lines for damage, mold-sniffing robots that can detect degradation of power pole foundations, wearable AI copilots guiding technicians through complex repairs, or autonomous robots rehabilitating aging pipelines. BrightAI doesn’t just monitor infrastructure—it automates and orchestrates action, making it smarter and more resilient for all who use it.
Announcing Upfront’s Investment in BrightAI
BrightAI has earned over $100M over five years as a bootstrapped company. Now, I’m excited to announce that they’ve raised their first outside capital from us at Upfront.
Every investment is a story—and the best ones start with a relationship.
I first met Alex Hawkinson while doing diligence on a company that eventually became an Upfront portfolio company. He was the company’s board chairman and a co-founder, and I wanted to hear the origin story and learn about his plans to stay involved in the business after we invested.
I learned in our first conversations that Alex is a visionary technologist working at the cutting edge his whole career. After selling SmartThings, the early smart home IoT businesses he co-founded, to Samsung, he helped scale the platform to one of the largest IoT platforms in the world.
He is also a talent magnet. Alex has recruited engineers and leaders who have also been at the forefront of technology advancements for the last two decades. Most notable is his CTO, Kiran Bharwani. After launching and leading Caterpillar’s autonomous vehicle team and achieving L4 autonomy in mining, Kiran founded the ADAS team at Rivian, going from clean sheet to IPO. He joined BrightAI to build foundational AI and autonomy systems that can improve our built world.
But technology alone wasn’t the reason we invested. Before I invest, I always ask myself, “Who is this person? What motivates them to pursue this company? What kind of partner will they be?”
I’ve been lucky to work on two companies with Alex before investing in BrightAI and joining the board. With Alex, the answers have always been clear. He’s the CEO who combines ambitious vision with crisp execution and notable humility. Building his next IoT company – combining all his previous experience to go after one of our most important challenges as a country – is what he was born to do.
We at Upfront Ventures and I are excited to join Alex on this journey. It’s Day 1 (it’s always Day 1), and the future is bright.