Niederer Kraft Frey advised Index Ventures on its investment in EthonAI.

EthonAI, a pioneer of AI-powered manufacturing analytics, completed a USD 16.5 million (CHF 15 million) series A financing led by Index Ventures, with existing investors General Catalyst, Earlybird, and Founderful participating.

EthonAI was co-founded by Julian Senoner (CEO) and Bernhard Kratzwald (CTO) in 2021. Together with Torbjørn Netland, a renowned ETH professor of production management, they realised the value of their research and decided to make their technology available to the broader industry. EthonAI builds causal AI to give engineers and factory managers a ‘sixth sense’ about what’s happening on the floor – using sensor and production data to spot defects, identify inefficiencies and their causes, improve quality and slash waste.

Multinationals including Lindt & Sprüngli and Siemens, the consumer and industrial electronics company, are already using EthonAI across multiple factories to derive insights from their data trove.

The NKF team was led by Corporate/M&A and Technology partner Jacques Bonvin, working with partner Andrea Wuerzner, associates Boris Catzeflis and Melchior Ebener, junior associate Robert Deprez-Fernandes (all Corporate/M&A) and partner Marcel Meier (Tax).