Quality failures do not arrive with fireworks. They slip in quietly through service notes, field logs, warranty claims, and emails no one at HQ reads until customers start calling lawyers. Daniel First saw that gap clearly at McKinsey, where engineers on the ground knew the truth months before leadership did. Axion came out of that tension, not as another dashboard pretending to be smart, but as an observability command center where weak signals stop whispering and start talking. This week, that conviction locked in a $37M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures, and the signal just got impossible to ignore.
Axion builds AI for people who actually touch the product. The platform ingests customer, service, field, and telematics data, then connects the dots with human judgment still in the loop. That design choice matters. Manufacturers using Axion are cutting downtime by 27%, reducing warranty and service costs by 16%, and accelerating root cause analysis by 85%. Weeks instead of months. Real outcomes, fast. One global HVAC manufacturer cleared $10M+ in verified ROI in five months by stopping issues before they reached customers. No theater, just math that CFOs respect.
This raise brings Axion to $62M total funding, following a $7.5M seed led by Amplo and Inspired Capital and a $17.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with RTX Ventures. The Series B adds Schneider Electric Ventures and deepens a bench of investors who understand manufacturing gravity. Salesforce Ventures is not just writing a check here. When Axion integrates with Salesforce Data Cloud and Service Cloud, quality moves from a back-office autopsy to a live, customer-connected system where problems surface early and stay solved.
The customer roster reads like a manufacturing roll call. Cummins, Medtronic, Boeing, Harley-Davidson, Daikin, SharkNinja, Baxter, DENSO, Newell, Pratt & Whitney. Different sectors, same tax. Poor quality quietly drains up to 10% of annual revenue. Axion does not sell fear. It sells clarity. Detect earlier. Investigate faster. Fix once and institutionalize the lesson. That is how quality stops being reactive and starts behaving like strategy.
None of this happens without the builders. Daniel First and Rebecca Trachtenberg laid the foundation, and the platform continues to scale with Gonçalo Silva Santos stepping in as CTO to harden the engine. New York roots, global deployments, and AI that respects engineers instead of sidelining them. This Series B is not a victory lap. It is a pressure test. Axion looks comfortable carrying the load.
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