13 March 2025 
Augury, a US company that specialises in applying AI to industrial reliability and process optimisation, has unveiled what it claims is the world’s first AI-driven monitoring and diagnostics system for slow-rotating (1-150 rpm) machinery. The announcement comes shortly after the company raised $75m in a new round of funding.
The “breakthrough” monitoring system uses ultrasonic sensing and advanced AI diagnostics to detect faults early and accurately in low-rpm equipment that was previously considered too complex to monitor continuously.
Historically, users of such low-speed machinery have had to accept costly downtime when failures occur. Even traditional monitoring systems – such as handheld devices or online monitoring systems – have been unable to avoid such disruptions. These tools rely on basic thresholds and manual guesswork, often triggering false alarms and missing critical early warning signs.
Augury’s new Halo U2000 Ultrasonic Sensing system can monitor slow-rotating equipment continuously, collecting long-sample, high-frequency (up to 100kHz) data samples. The sensor data is sent to a machine health monitoring platform which produces prescriptive diagnostics.
If it detects any faults, the system delivers warnings including fault severity and root causes, as well as recommended actions. It can monitor hundreds of ultra-low-rpm assets and detect faults such as bearing failures, lubrication issues, damaged rotors, loose windings, gear problems, electrical faults, imbalances, misalignments and eccentricities.
“In one instance, our Machine Health Ultra Low detected an impacting issue and a loose bolt in a critical rotary kiln gearbox at a mining site – a problem that, if left unaddressed, could have led to a devastating fire,” reports Augury’s co-founder and chief product and technology officer, Gal Shaul.
“Rotary kilns, operating at 20-25rpm, are a prime example of slow-rotating machines that have been nearly impossible to monitor,” he adds. “By catching this issue early, we helped our customer to boost worker safety and avoid losing 4,000 hours and $100k+ to an unplanned downtime event. This is exactly why we built this solution – to bring real, measurable impact to the most challenging industrial assets.
“Our machine health solutions are widely embraced in the industry for their fast time-to-value, high accuracy and transformative impact,” Shaul continues. “Yet, manufacturing environments continue to present complexities that demand more sophisticated solutions. Our team thrives on solving these challenges, and the low-rpm solution is an example of how we’re bringing our prescriptive diagnostics approach to a new frontier, delivering greater intelligence and reliability to the most difficult-to-monitor machines.”
The low-rpm monitoring technology is part of Augury’s Machine Health 360° platform, which provides AI-powered diagnostics for difficult-to-monitor, yet critical, industrial assets. The new technology expands the platform’s coverage to hundreds of extra types of asset.
Augury has recently raised $75m in a funding round being led by Lightrock, with backing from existing investors including Schneider Electric Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. Since its last funding round in 2021, Augury has seen a five-fold increase in revenues, tripled its customer base among Fortune 500 manufacturers, and expanded its product portfolio from asset performance and reliability to incorporate AI-driven systems for process optimisation.
“Augury has a long history of firsts, from the introduction of prescriptive AI-driven solutions that eliminate downtime and the first truly global-scale Industrial IoT deployments in our category to the introduction of AI solutions that encompass both machine and process health,” says co-founder and CEO, Saar Yoskovitz. “With this new funding we will continue that track record, breaking new ground in the introduction of Agentic-AI capabilities that build on our expertise and that our customers can trust across their most critical assets and processes.”
Augury’s customers include PepsiCo, DuPont, and Colgate-Palmolive. Since its last funding round, Augury has analysed more than 500 million hours of machine data and generated an estimated $1bn of value for customers in more than 40 countries. It predicts that by 2040, its technologies could cut emissions by around 12%, resulting in 3 million tonnes in annual CO2 reductions around the world.
“We are proud of our position as a leader in Industrial AI,” said Yoskovitz. “But we see our accomplishments to-date as simply the preparation for the opportunity we have ahead of us. We are excited to partner with the world’s leading manufacturers to usher in a new generation of AI and push the boundaries of human productivity.”
