New York-based industrial AI startup CVector just closed a $5 million seed round to expand its AI-powered optimization platform across manufacturing plants and utilities. Led by Powerhouse Ventures with backing from Fusion Fund, Myriad Venture Partners, and Hitachi Ventures, the funding validates the company's pitch that factories desperately need software that translates tiny operational tweaks into real dollar savings. Founders Richard Zhang and Tyler Ruggles are now racing to prove their 'nervous system' for heavy industry can deliver measurable ROI at scale.
CVector just convinced investors that industrial America needs a digital nervous system. The New York startup closed a $5 million seed round to wire AI into factories, utilities, and chemical plants that desperately need to know whether flipping a single valve actually saves money. It's the kind of unglamorous question that keeps plant managers up at night - and one that Powerhouse Ventures is betting billions of dollars in industrial efficiency hangs on.
The financing, announced exclusively to TechCrunch, includes backing from Fusion Fund, Myriad Venture Partners, and Hitachi Ventures. It comes less than a year after CVector's pre-seed round last July, when founders Richard Zhang and Tyler Ruggles were still making the case that heavy industry needed AI at all.
That pitch got a lot easier. CVector now counts metals processors, advanced manufacturing facilities, chemical producers, and public utilities among its customers - companies dealing with the messy reality of optimizing century-old infrastructure with machine learning. One client, Iowa-based ATEK Metal Technologies, uses CVector's platform to predict equipment failures, track energy efficiency across its aluminum casting operations for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and monitor commodity prices that swing raw material costs.
