The pitch deck convinced Carsten Maschmeyer and N8n founder

When you talk to investors about possible “megatrends” and fields that have a lot of potential for innovation and new solutions, quite a few people have been mentioning industry for some time now.

Germany and its factories. Quite a bit of pressure not to miss the connection. And companies like United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) from Cologne want to help.

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The startup sees itself as an “industrial data layer” for the manufacturing industry – i.e. as an intermediate layer that collects data from machines, sensors and IT systems, organizes it and makes it usable.​

“Data socket” for modern factories

You can imagine it like this: a factory functions like a city. Sensors everywhere, traffic lights, meters, buses – they all send data. UMH is building something like a unified traffic control center for this city: all information comes together in a “Unified Namespace”, is provided with context (from which machine, from which line, in which plant, on which shift) and is then available in real time.

This means companies can easily build things like live metrics for the shop floor, energy and resource monitoring, condition monitoring of machines or – somewhat more complexly – AI models that detect anomalies or optimize processes.

As I said: Investors believe in this segment, including here. The founders Alexander Krüger (CEO) and Jeremy Theocharis (CTO) raised more than five million euros in a seed round.

Known investors and business angels on board

The round is led by Kompas VC, joined by Carsten Maschmeyers Seed + Speed ​​Ventures, Sustainable Future Ventures (SFV Capital) and Archimedes New Ventures.

The angel squad is also striking: Jan Oberhauser, founder and CEO of the AI ​​unicorn N8n, and Jeff Hammerbacher, who co-founded Cloudera and is one of the early data science pioneers at Facebook, are also there.

With the fresh capital, the startup wants to technically deepen its open source platform and bring it to market more broadly. UMH has already won some large customers, such as the baby food manufacturer Hipp, the supermarket chain Edeka and the assembly technology company Böllhoff. At the same time, engineering and go-to-market teams are expected to grow, and expansion in Europe is expected to noticeably pick up speed.

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Big goals

However, UMH is not alone in this bet on the Unified Namespace. A small but growing ecosystem of providers is forming in Germany and Europe who are also working on bringing production data from industry into standardized structures that are available in real time. I-flow, for example, comes from Germany and supports industrial companies in setting up distributed UNS architectures.

Billion-dollar software companies have long since emerged in areas such as ERP, CRM and HR, says Niklas Hebborn, Chief Commercial Officer of UMH and former partner at Frank Thelens Freigeist Capital, where he already invested in UMH as a pre-seed investor. Such a player is still missing in digital manufacturing. UMH sees its opportunity in filling this slot as an industrial data company.

This is the pitch deck

We will exclusively show you the 20-page pitch deck from United Manufacturing Hub, with which the industrial startup was able to secure its seed financing round. You can find more pitch decks from other startups here.

United Manufacturing Hub