Sierra Ventures leads funding round with additional investment from Osage Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures, and participation by existing investor Foothill Ventures; founding team from Siemens applies AI to help industrials rapidly digitize vital trade skills and turn them into accessible, programmable training
DeepHow, the AI company that turns technical know-how into smart, how-to training videos, has closed $9M in pre-Series A funding. Sierra Ventures, a specialist in early-stage VC funding, led the round with participation by Osage Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and pre-seed investor Foothill Ventures. DeepHow’s total funding now stands at $13M million. The company will use this additional funding to solidify its technical lead, accelerate its market expansion in Asia, and fuel its enterprise sales and marketing initiatives.
“This oversubscribed pre-Series A round underscores the vision we share with our investors and demonstrates their confidence in our ability to build on our technical leadership and accelerate our go-to-market operations,” said Dr. Sam Zheng, CEO and co-founder of DeepHow.
DeepHow combines the latest advances in AI, natural-language processing, computer vision, and knowledge mapping to revolutionize how knowledge is captured, digitized, and organized. The company has developed and markets an AI-powered workforce readiness platform for the skilled trades. Designed for the manufacturing, field service, construction, and equipment maintenance sectors, DeepHow streamlines the capture and transfer of technical skills and know-how — compressing project time ten-fold, boosting worker performance by 25 percent, and dramatically reducing overall training and development costs.
Commenting on the market potential for DeepHow, Zheng said: “Manufacturing is the economic backbone of many countries and the largest driver of employment. The top-ten largest manufacturing countries in terms of economic output employ an average of 15% of their workforce—12 million in the US, 8 million in Germany, 10 million in Japan, and over 110 million in China. We see an enormous opportunity to equip manufacturers globally with advanced and proven technology to help them up-skill and re-skill these workers.”
“Sam and his experienced team at DeepHow have developed breakthrough technology that is already delivering a clear ROI in enterprise manufacturing settings,” said Ben Yu, managing partner at Sierra Ventures. “DeepHow is seeing strong market tailwinds due to the rapid changes in technology, an aging workforce, and the shortage of skilled workers in the global manufacturing and service industries. There’s a clear opportunity for the team to establish DeepHow as the leading knowledge capture and training platform for the manufacturing and service industries.”
“The DeepHow platform delivers a highly differentiated solution for building scalable and effective training for the industrial workforce,” said Nate Lentz, managing partner of Osage Venture Partners. “Leveraging advanced AI technology and the team’s deep domain expertise, DeepHow is uniquely positioned to solve the growing skills gap and labor shortage in skilled trades. DeepHow has already delivered real value and ROI to leading manufacturer customers, and we are excited to partner with the team to help further their leadership position in the market.”
“The high costs of training and developing a new, skilled manufacturing workforce calls for more efficient employee onboarding and task performance,” said Carlos Kokron, vice president of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Americas. “DeepHow’s AI-powered, cost-effective video-based knowledge capturing and learning platform significantly improves the speed of know-how transfer, helping bridge the skills gap. We’re excited to invest and support DeepHow in leveraging AI to further advance the Industry 4.0 digital transformation of enterprises.”