When we first worked with Lauren Dunford, during Covid, she was running a seed-stage company called Safi that had been started in Kenya. It was a small team making a relatively simple product, but she had a big vision around making millions of small and medium-size factories efficient, productive and sustainable. 

We took her team through the category design process to help them solidify and articulate that vision and define the category they wanted to create.

Three Years Later, a $31M B Round

The company is now called Guidewheel. Soon after we worked together, Guidwheel raised an $8 million A round. Now, it just raised $31 million in a series B round. Its customers include Kimberly Clark, General Motors, U.S. Steel and a horde of smaller, lesser-known manufacturers around the world. Lauren was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Her company is on fire, and it is creating a new category called FactoryOps. 

Here’s how Guidewheel describes itself now, as quoted from the announcement of the B round: 

Guidewheel provides the first way to bring AI to the factory floor at scale—every machine, in every factory. Inspired by the universal truth that every machine on the factory floor uses power, Guidewheel starts with non-invasive sensors that simply clip like a smartwatch on the power draw of any machine to bring its real-time “heartbeat” into a connected, AI-powered FactoryOps platform.

Lauren’s company solves a problem for smaller manufacturers – and even larger ones: how to improve operations and sustainability without spending a fortune on gadgets and software or tearing up the factory floor. Too many factories operate in what we called a “production fog” – which means the factory team will never identify efficiency killers while constantly and often ineffectively firefighting instead of getting ahead of problems.

Guidewheel’s affordable devices clip on a power line going to a machine, monitor the power going through it, and feed that data to an AI-powered platform that makes suggestions to boost productivity and drive down energy use.

The Guidewheel Vision

“What we’re building has the potential to truly be the real time layer for every factory on the planet,” Lauren told us when she was on the Category Thinkers podcast last fall. “And there are 10 million factories on the planet, and it’s building with that mission in mind. Not that we’re going to do all that tomorrow, but that’s what we’re building towards. So we knew what we were doing was swinging for the fences in terms of going for that massive impact.”

Lauren noted on the podcast that it was helpful to go through category design early in the company’s existence. 

“I think that was the perfect time for us to do this, and the reason is it wasn’t just customers who were either bucketing us incorrectly or not quite getting it, but also we needed to make sure that we were clear about what we are building and why,” she said. 

“So as we brought on more investors, more teammates, more customers, we were aligning ourselves with the people who were mission-driven with us in building towards that same thing. We actually took the category point of view, and we shared it with every potential investor during our series A fundraise, and then the goal was, hey, attract the people who actually want to do what we’re doing and go after this big vision and impact with us.”

We at CDA are excited about seeing where Lauren takes Guidewheel. 

“We’ve got AI models already in production that are hugely powerful and really surprising in the insights that we’re able to get from that electrical heartbeat,” she said. “This type of thing needs to exist in the world. It’s not just what we want to do as a company.”

Want to articulate your category vision to improve your fundraising activity? Book an office hours slot with CDA now.