Sight Machine, the industry's leading digital manufacturing platform, today announced it has raised $29.4 million in Series C venture capital from a group of investors led by Korea's LS Group.

The company also announced the addition of two directors to its board: Yumi Lee, the Chief Strategy Officer of LS Corp. (KRX: 006260), a holding company of LS Group, and Dan Fishback, the former CEO of DemandTec and a seasoned leader of pioneering data and analytics companies.

Of the $1.18 trillion in worldwide spending on digital transformation in 2019, $346 billion will be spent in the discrete and process manufacturing industries, more than in any other industries, according to an April 2019 report by International Data Corp.

"Manual data wrangling is consuming the majority of digital transformation project budgets," said Jon Sobel, Sight Machine's CEO. "By enabling industry to shift to automated data transformation -- using a product instead of services -- Sight Machine offers manufacturers unique insight, concrete and significant ROI, and the only way to scale."

This financing accelerates Sight Machine's growth at a moment of inflection for the company and the manufacturing industry. From 2017 to 2018, Sight Machine's customer contract value increased almost 400 percent. During 2018, multiple Sight Machine clients demonstrated gains in throughput and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of 10 percent or more, metrics that directly drive revenue and profitability.

Sight Machine's platform has recently been deployed by some of the world's largest companies in the automotive, food and beverage, and pulp and paper sectors, including Nissan Motor Co., Heineken N.V. and Westrock Co. 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.

In addition to LS Group, there was significant participation from Sight Machine's existing investors, including Mercury Fund, Jump Capital, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and E.ON.

"We are excited to establish an investment and partner relationship with Sight Machine," said LS Corp.'s Lee. "Sight Machine is a true leader in digital manufacturing platforms with a proven ability to scale. Our efforts in building digital capabilities with Sight Machine should serve not only to support Sight Machine's growth but to drive innovation across the many global industries LS serves."

"Sight Machine has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to turn the torrent of factory data into improved business results for its manufacturing customers," said board member Fishback. "I'm excited about the opportunity to be part of Sight Machine's next phase of growth."

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.