EIT Digital Challenge winner and EIT Digital Accelerator alumnus KONUX secures €65.7 million Series C financing round, becoming one of the largest AI scaleups in Europe in the field of sustainable transportation.
KONUX, a leading German AI scaleup, transforming railway operations for a sustainable future, has successfully secured a €65.7 million ($80m) Series C funding, led by German investor Sanno Capital. Other investors joining the round include DIVC, New Enterprise Associates, Dick Kramlich and Deutsche Invest Capital Partners. Furthermore, Athos, the investment vehicle of the Struengmanns brothers, who are the largest shareholders of Covid-19 vaccine maker BioNTech, joined as a new investor.
“We will create more than a hundred new and super exciting jobs, especially in data science and software engineering to significantly expand our product portfolio and AI technological leadership. Additionally, we will boost our global market footprint.” – commented Andreas Kunze, Co-Founder and CEO of KONUX.
KONUX’s Industrial IoT solution helps minimise train delays by efficiently maintaining railway switches, which, according to the company, are responsible for a fifth of infrastructure related train delays in Europe.
The company joined the EIT Digital Accelerator as a startup in 2014 after winning the first prize in the EIT Digital Challenge. Consequently, they received pan-European coaching and international growth support by the Accelerator team. The company grew extremely fast raising funding in every following year: €1.6M in 2015, €6.2M in 2016, €7.4M in 2017, €16.5M in 2018, and €11.5M in 2019. In parallel, the scaleup acquired key international customers such as Deutsche Bahn and SNCF. In the EIT Digital’s Makers and Shapers series, KONUX shares its vision on the role of entrepreneurs in digitalisation of the European industries. Watch the video here.
Currently, KONUX is active in ten countries, both in Europe and in the most important rail markets in Asia. At the end of 2020, KONUX and Deutsche Bahn (DB) concluded long-term framework agreement on the digitization of DB’s switches, as critical elements of the rail infrastructure to make passenger travel and cargo transportation more reliable. Read more about this news here.
Since its foundation in 2014, KONUX has raised close to €110 million from world-leading investors, expanded to multiple countries in Europe and Asia, and was selected by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as one of the world’s 30 most innovative startups and scaleups worldwide.
