Rotomate, a Finnish industrial AI startup, has raised €2.1M in pre-seed funding to expand a platform that reads machine data and recommends maintenance actions the way a senior reliability engineer would.
The round was led by Helsinki-based Kvanted, with Robin Capital, Angel Invest, Accel's scout programme, and Business Finland also taking part. Angel investors Jiri Heinonen and Moaffak Ahmed joined.
Founded in 2024 by Mikko Kuusisto and Dr Jesse Miettinen, Rotomate is trying to close a gap that has widened across heavy industry. Plants have spent years installing sensors and condition-monitoring systems. The supply of specialists who can read the resulting data has not kept up.
The result, the company says, is alert fatigue. Maintenance teams cannot always tell which warnings need action now and which can wait.
From alerts to recommendations
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Rotomate's pitch is that it does not add another alarm. The platform analyses machine and operational data alongside maintenance records, then returns root-cause analysis and a suggested action.
“Improving industrial reliability is often constrained not by a lack of data but by the limited capacity of experts to continuously analyse and act on it,” said Mikko Kuusisto, co-founder and chief executive. “We built Rotomate to scale that expertise, so that every plant can act on the most up-to-date data around the clock.”
That framing puts Rotomate among a wider crop of European deep-tech startups selling automated judgement rather than raw monitoring. It echoes the pattern behind recent rounds such as ASML spinout Invisix, which raised €20M to inspect chips, and Apoha, which emerged from stealth to teach machines how matter behaves.
Dr Jesse Miettinen, co-founder and chief technology officer, said the aim is to move past systems that only flag problems. The company wants the software to replicate expert decision-making at scale, he said.
Customers and the claims behind them
Rotomate says it already works with process-industry firms including Metsä Group, SSAB, and Aurubis, and that those customers' sites together account for more than €35bn in annual production. Both figures are company-stated and have not been independently verified.
The company also says its platform can cut the time teams spend on manual monitoring while extending expert-level analysis across more assets. It has not published data to support that claim.
Rotomate pre-seed funding: where the money goes
The new capital will fund product development and international expansion, with hires planned across engineering, product, and commercial roles. The pitch lands as enterprises grow wary of AI tools that promise savings but deliver new costs, a tension visible in the debate over enterprise AI bills.
For now, Rotomate is early. The round is a pre-seed, the customer metrics come from the company, and the harder question is whether software can stand in for an engineer's judgement when a plant decides what to fix and what to leave running. That is the test the next 12 months will set.