MUNICH, Germany – KONUX, the Munich-based company that is currently bringing artificial intelligence and predictive maintenance to the rail industry, was selected among hundreds of candidates as one of the World Economic Forum’s “technology pioneers”, a selection of the world’s most innovative companies.
KONUX combines smart sensors and AI-based analytics to enable higher train punctuality and network capacity through predictive maintenance planning and an optimized utilisation of railroads. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) startup was founded in 2014 by Andreas Kunze, Vlad Lata and Dennis Humhal, at that time students at Technical University of Munich, and has recently closed a $16M Series A funding round. This year, KONUX will focus on its expansion on the European railway market and use its latest funding to further the use of artificial intelligence in its solutions.
The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers community are early-stage companies from around the world that are involved in the design, development and deployment of new technologies and innovations, and are poised to have a significant impact on business and society. The 30 technology pioneers that made it to the final selection are active in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, blockchain, cybersecurity, the (industrial) internet of things, and other pioneering technologies.
Many of the Pioneers will attend the Annual Meeting in Davos, in January 2018, and continue to participate in dedicated Technology Pioneer community events in the course of the next two years.
“We welcome KONUX in this group of extraordinary pioneers,” said Fulvia Montresor, Head of Technology Pioneers at the World Economic Forum. “We hope that thanks to this selection, the World Economic Forum can facilitate greater collaboration with business leaders, governments, civil society and other relevant individuals to accelerate the development of technological solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.”
“We feel very honored that the World Economic Forum acknowledged us as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and predictive maintenance”, said KONUX CEO Andreas Kunze. “We will do our best to not only work on digitizing the rail industry but to support a faster implementation of industrial IoT technologies and to help shape the future of mobility.”
The Technology Pioneers were selected by a selection committee of more than 60 academics, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and corporate executives. Notable members of the committee include Geoffrey Moore (Adviser, Geoffrey Moore Consulting, USA), Yossi Vardi (Chairman, International Technologies, Israel) and Lee Sang-Yup (Distinguished Professor and Dean, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea). The committee based its decisions on criteria including innovation, potential impact and leadership. Past recipients include Airbnb, Google, Kickstarter, Mozilla, Palantir Technologies, Scribd, Spotify, Twitter and Wikimedia.
All info on this year’s Technology Pioneers can be found here: http://widgets.weforum.org/techpioneers-2017
More information on past winners can be found here.
Munich-based IIoT company KONUX integrates smart sensor systems and AI-based analytics to deliver asset insights in real time and enable its customers to switch to predictive maintenance. The end-to-end solution uses artificial intelligence to help clients continuously monitor their infrastructure, identify maintenance needs ahead of time and improve operational efficiency. KONUX empowers industrial and rail companies to reach a new level of asset performance. Since its foundation in 2014, KONUX has raised a total of $18M in funding from world-leading investors and has built a team of currently 35 employees. For more information visit: www.konux.com.
The World Economic Forum, committed to improving the state of the world, is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas (www.weforum.org).