Zurich, May 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Industrial operators across Europe and North America are facing a problem they can’t inspect their way out of. Fine dust, friction, electrical faults, and aging equipment are pushing fire and downtime risk into territory that insurers will no longer underwrite at viable premiums. Sites that were insurable five years ago are being deemed too risky today. Against that backdrop, AVIAN – the Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone facilities – today announced it has raised a $2.6M pre-seed round, led by Founderful.
A belt failure caught by an AVIAN camera with smoke filling the room.
AVIAN was profitable and entirely bootstrapped for two years before raising. The company says it raised this round to go faster, expand engineering and deployment capacity, and scale beyond its stronghold in wood products into recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime. AVIAN is on track to surpass $1M in ARR in 2026.
How AVIAN works
Insurance markets are tightening, and more sites are being treated as high risk as equipment ages and failure rates climb. The old approach to thermal safety still looks like periodic thermography, a technician walking the floor with a handheld camera once a quarter. That method misses the window that matters: the hours when a component starts running hot before it fails. Most thermal vendors also stop at the hardware, selling a camera and leaving operators to figure out setup, monitoring, and escalation on their own. AVIAN takes a different approach: the sensor is one component of solving the problem, not the product. Customers are typically up and running in minutes, not months.
AVIAN dashboard showing thermal images of multiple cameras.
AVIAN is built to run like an always-on reliability layer. Its thermal cameras continuously watch the critical components that most often become ignition points, motors, bearings, conveyors, presses, and electrical cabinets, and learn what “normal” looks like in that specific plant. From there, the system focuses on drift, the early heat patterns that show up before failure. Smart alarms filter out routine heat sources so teams aren’t chasing noise, and alerts go to the right people with enough lead time to intervene before a hot component turns into downtime or fire.
AVIAN also generates automated predictive maintenance reports and backs the platform with 24/7 human support. Every alarm event is reviewed and fed back into the models, so detection keeps improving across the fleet and each new site benefits from what AVIAN has already learned in the field.
Customer results
Over the last two years, AVIAN has prevented $50M+ in damages from fires and equipment failures and is deployed in approximately 50 sites across 9 countries.
The impact is clear. Kamps Pallet reduced annual insurance costs by 10% at its Dillwyn sawmill after deploying AVIAN’s system. Sierra Pacific Industries has avoided 24+ hours of unplanned downtime at its Quincy site in the last 12 months alone. Schilliger Holz has used AVIAN to avoid fires and run tighter against unscheduled stops.
In several cases, the system has caught incidents at the point where they still looked small. A pellet press fire was detected early for a customer in Switzerland, avoiding millions in damage. In Germany, AVIAN flagged a small electrical fire next to a machine worth millions. Containing it early protected both the asset and the next 6 to 18 months of production that could have been lost waiting for a replacement.
“AVIAN has developed a solution to a problem which probably affects everyone in the industry directly. For us, it is a great partnership as it helps us make our operations much safer and improves the monitoring process. You will never be able to reduce the risk of fires to zero, but you can do everything you can to minimize the danger as much as possible – and AVIAN makes that possible in a simple and straightforward way,” said Ernest Schilliger, CEO Schilliger Holz.
AVIAN founders Drew Hanover and Thomas Laengle.
The team
AVIAN is a 10-person team based in Zurich. The company was founded after one of Switzerland’s largest sawmills saw Hanover’s robotics and AI research in the Swiss media and reached out about escalating fires, downtime, and rising insurance pressure.
“Most operators don’t need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it,” said Drew Hanover, Co-Founder and CTO of AVIAN. “We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are. We spent zero minutes on a deck.”
Alex Stöckl, Partner at Founderful added: “Within a year of incorporation, the team at AVIAN already served dozens of manufacturing businesses in the US and Europe, preventing real fire incidents on a daily basis. With their thermal-vision technology, there’s an immediate ROI and a new industrial intelligence layer that unlocks further use cases and value for customers over time – backing them to accelerate their go-to-market and product roadmap was a no-brainer.”
What’s next
AVIAN’s roadmap splits into two tracks. First, the company has spent years building relationships with insurers to understand how risk is assessed, and its growing camera fleet is positioned to produce something underwriters increasingly demand: real-time, site-level risk assessments backed by live thermal telemetry. Second, AVIAN Vision extends the platform beyond thermal by upgrading existing CCTV systems to detect smoke and fire, giving customers a way to broaden 24/7 protection across an entire facility without replacing the infrastructure they already operate.
AVIAN’s long-term thesis is straightforward. Industrial risk has been priced for decades using actuarial tables and historical claims data. The next decade will be priced using quantifiable, real-time operational data, and AVIAN believes sites that have become difficult to insure can become insurable again through data, discipline, and proactive systems.
Media images can be found here.
About AVIAN
AVIAN is a Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for high-risk operations. Its end-to-end platform — combining infrared camera hardware, anomaly detection, smart alarms, predictive maintenance reports, a notification engine, and human support — is deployed at approximately 50 sites across 9 countries, primarily in wood products, with growing traction in recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime. AVIAN’s mission is to make high-risk industries safe and insurable again. More at avian-iot.com.
About Founderful
Founderful is Switzerland’s leading pre-seed fund, backing founder teams building tech companies with the potential to become global market leaders. Founderful has a track record of supporting exceptional founders in creating breakthrough companies and has the passionate conviction that the Swiss startup ecosystem is just starting to write its best success stories.
