AVIAN raises $2.6M to bring always-on thermal intelligence to high-risk industrial sites

Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone facilities, AVIAN, has raised a $2.6M pre-seed round, led by Founderful. 

Insurance markets are tightening, and more sites are being treated as high risk as equipment ages and failure rates climb.

The old approach to thermal safety still looks like periodic thermography, a technician walking the floor with a handheld camera once a quarter. That method misses the window that matters: the hours when a component starts running hot before it fails. Most thermal vendors also stop at the hardware, selling a camera and leaving operators to figure out setup, monitoring, and escalation on their own. 

AVIAN takes a different approach: the sensor is one component of solving the problem, not the product.

Customers are typically up and running in minutes, not months. AVIAN is built to run like an always-on reliability layer. Its thermal cameras continuously watch the critical components that most often become ignition points, motors, bearings, conveyors, presses, and electrical cabinets, and learn what “normal” looks like in that specific plant.  

From there, the system focuses on drift, the early heat patterns that show up before failure. Smart alarms filter out routine heat sources so teams aren’t chasing noise, and alerts go to the right people with enough lead time to intervene before a hot component turns into downtime or fire.  

AVIAN also generates automated predictive maintenance reports and backs the platform with 24/7 human support.

Every alarm event is reviewed and fed back into the models, so detection keeps improving across the fleet and each new site benefits from what AVIAN has already learned in the field.  In several cases, the system has caught incidents at the point where they still looked small. A pellet press fire was detected early for a customer in Switzerland, avoiding millions in damage.

In Germany, AVIAN flagged a small electrical fire next to a machine worth millions. Containing it early protected both the asset and the next 6 to 18 months of production that could have been lost waiting for a replacement.

AVIAN is a 10-person team based in Zurich. The company was founded after one of Switzerland’s largest sawmills saw Hanover’s robotics and AI research in the Swiss media and reached out about escalating fires, downtime, and rising insurance pressure. 

"Most operators don't need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it," said Drew Hanover, Co-Founder and CTO of AVIAN.

 "We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted.

We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are.  We spent zero minutes on a deck."

Significantly, AVIAN was profitable and entirely bootstrapped for two years before raising. The company says it raised this round to go faster, expand engineering and deployment capacity, and scale beyond its stronghold in wood products into recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime. 

AVIAN is on track to surpass $1M in ARR in 2026.  

Over the last two years, AVIAN has prevented $50M+ in damages from fires and equipment failures and is deployed in approximately 50 sites across 9 countries.        

According to Alex Stöckl, Partner at Founderful.

"Within a year of incorporation, the team at AVIAN already served dozens of manufacturing businesses in the US and Europe, preventing real fire incidents on a daily basis.

With their thermal-vision technology, there's an immediate ROI and a new industrial intelligence layer that unlocks further use cases and value for customers over time - backing them to accelerate their go-to-market and product roadmap was a no-brainer."