Fero Labs, a startup co-founded by former WiMNet Ph.D. student Dr. Berk Birand, recently raised $1.6M in seed funding from investors led by Mike Brown (CC’06), managing partner at Bowery Capital and Sinovation Ventures, founded by Kai-Fu Lee (CC’83).

Fero Labs focuses on bringing machine learning to the factory floor to optimize production, reduce waste, and improve product quality. As the industrial IoT grows, automated assembly lines produce a continuous stream of data, but tools to analyze and act on the data are decades behind. Fero Labs’ statistical machine learning software provides factories with a virtual data scientist to predict quality errors and machine downtime. Customers include a steel mill, oil refinery, and auto factory.

Fero labs was founded by Dr. Berk Birand (CEO) and Dr. Alp Kucukelbir (Chief Scientist), formerly a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science. It is located in the SoHo to capitalize on the founders’ Columbia ties, the city’s growing computer & engineering talent, and New York’s relative proximity to Europe, a target market.

For more details, see the Electrical Engineering Dept. news item.