N.B.’s Smart Skin Technologies Raises $10.7-Million, Plans To Hire 50 More People
FREDERICTON — Fredericton-based IIoT productivity solutions company Smart Skin Technologies recently announced it raised $10.7-million to accelerate the company’s growth in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries.
BDC Capital’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund led the financing round. Existing investors including SCHOTT AG, Mariner’s East Valley Ventures and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation also participated in the financing.
Smart Skin Technologies’ patented Quantifeel solutions fuse innovative sensors, deep analytics and artificial intelligence to provide global manufacturers with data on the forces their containers experience during the filling and packaging process. This helps workers to better control the process; preventing product defects and costly downtime.
The company currently supports 18 of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies and nearly every major bottling company in the world with its Quantifeel solutions.
“The technology originally helped customers identify some of the problems on their line and we got a really unique data set that gives them visibility into what their containers are exactly experiencing,” says Scott Van Wart, vice-president of business development for Smart Skin.
“Then our software solution takes that data, and what we’ve discovered is we’re not only helping them solve damage problems, but we’re also helping them find all kinds of productivity enhancement they can implement as well.”
Gerry Pond, the co-founder of East Valley Ventures and the chair of Smart Skin Technologies, says this is the biggest round to date. He said the funding will be used to grow the business, including hiring 50 new employees over the next year.
“We’ll be expanding some of the marketing and sale capability, but more importantly some technology capability to our products and that requires the development of software. About half the number of people we’re hiring will go on to that type of project,” said Pond in an interview with Huddle. “It’s an important development for us as well as just sheer expansion of the business, [including] some senior job positions as well as some technical job positions.”
Joe Regan, the Managing Partner of the Industrial Innovation Venture Fund at BDC Capital, will also be joining Smart Skin’s Board of Directors chaired by Pond.
“Smart Skin’s success in deploying their technology and delivering a quantifiable return on investment to some of the world’s leading corporations is what originally attracted us,” said Regan, in a release. “We are excited about the opportunity to play a role in accelerating Smart Skin’s expansion in this important market.”
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