While shop floors at large OEMs are embracing the beginning of the robotics and automation eras, the actual humans working in these shops have been mostly forgotten by technology. But Tulip, a software platform for shop engineers, operators and managers, is looking to change all that.
To that end, Tulip has raised $13 million in Series A led by NEA, with participation from Pitango Venture Capital and other existing investors. As part of the deal, NEA partner Dayna Greyson will join the company’s board of directors.
Even though the rise of robotics and automation stands to change the way manufacturers produce goods, people working in these plants are often using the most rudimentary tools to refine processes, debug, etc. That includes clipboards, stop watches, and Excel spreadsheets, which are far from real time and simply collect troves of manually input data without pulling insights automatically.
That’s where Tulip comes in.
Tulip provides a software platform that lets sensors, cameras, and other IoT hardware communicate with each other in a central back-end system, regardless of the protocol. Folks unfamiliar with this type of software…