Sight Machine Inc., the industry's leading digital manufacturing platform, today announced a venture capital investment from Sony Innovation Fund (SIF), Sony Corporation's venture capital arm. Sony is joining the Series C venture round Sight Machine announced in April, adding to the $29.4 million that was announced at the time.

Since inception, SIF has been focused on investments in disruptive enterprise applications, Industrial IoT (IIoT) and AI, which are improving operational efficiencies while generating new value across industries. The combination of IIoT and AI led SIF to Sight Machine, whose true digital twin manufacturing solutions are delivering tangible benefits to their customers and partners.

"Sight Machine is bringing IT and OT together in ways that have brought real operational efficiencies and manufacturing innovation to global customers in process and discrete manufacturing industries," said Gen Tsuchikawa, Head of Sony Innovation Fund. "Their solutions cover a wide variety of manufacturing scenarios. We look forward to working with the Sight Machine team to explore ways to grow their footprint in Japan and beyond."

SIF is always looking for ways to support its portfolio companies, both within and beyond Sony's footprint. SIF has been actively investing for the past three years across the world. SIF's investment in Sight Machine supports SIF's thesis to invest in companies that are driving innovation.

"Japanese manufacturers have long led the way in continuous improvement of manufacturing," said Sight Machine CEO and Co-Founder Jon Sobel. "But many companies have squeezed all they can out of visible information and methodologies focused on single machines or processes. The next generation of continuous improvement will be led by using digital production data to understand and control manufacturing faster, better and at the system level, with the help of funding from investors like SIF."

Sight Machine's platform has recently been deployed by some of the world's largest companies in the automotive, food and beverage, packaging, and pulp and paper sectors. The company is stream processing and continuously analyzing data from manufacturing operations across four continents-North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

In addition to strong organic growth, Sight Machine has created an industry-leading ecosystem of global partners, including cloud platform providers Microsoft, Google and Amazon, system integrators, such as Fujitsu, leading consultancies, and E.ON, one of Europe's largest energy companies. Sight Machine's platform uses AI-enabled digital twins of the entire production process to help manufacturers continuously improve productivity, quality and profitability.

About Sony Innovation Fund
Established in July 2016 by Sony Corporation, Sony Innovation Fund engages with pioneering startups to help fuel the development of disruptive technologies and launch new businesses. In addition to investment, Sony Innovation Fund closely collaborates with the startups in which it invests, connecting them with businesses throughout Sony and its worldwide network of partners, providing guidance and advice, and collaborating with them to help achieve common success. Learn more at: www.sonyinnovationfund.com.

About Sight Machine
Sight Machine is powering the digital transformation of manufacturing, used by Global 500 companies to make better, faster decisions about their operations. Sight Machine's analytics platform, purpose-built for discrete and process manufacturing, uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics to help address critical challenges in quality and productivity throughout the enterprise. Sight Machine is optimized to run on the major cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and AWS. For more information, please visit www.sightmachine.com.