Guidewheel (previously Safi), a pioneer in cloud-based FactoryOps, based out of Kenya and the United States, has announced that it has closed a $8 million Series A fundraising round led by Greycroft. Leading corporations, angel investors, and Fortune 500 executives also joined Greycroft in the round.
Guidewheel’s growth will be fueled by the investment as it pioneers a new category of cloud-powered FactoryOps, enabling all of the world’s factories to digitize their operations and achieve sustainable peak performance. The company is also changing its name from Safi to Guidewheel in order to emphasize its value as a tool for guiding teams to manufacturing excellence.
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“FactoryOps is now possible because the power of the cloud can democratize access to the tools once only available to elite manufacturers. And it couldn’t come at a more critical time,” said Guidewheel CEO and Co-Founder Lauren Dunford. “In an environment of increasing pressure and uncertainty, every manufacturer needs to get more out of the equipment they already have. Now, any factory can connect all of their machines to immediately identify and take actions to improve, and have all the tools to reach peak performance as a team. If all the world’s 10 million factories can reach maximum efficiency, the impact will be tremendous.”
Guidewheel has raised a total of $12 million to date, with prior rounds from LocalGlobe, Savannah Fund, and DEG, as well as governmental financing from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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Why The Investors Invested
“Guidewheel has built the real-time data platform we believe will help create the future of manufacturing,” said Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft. “It is an amazingly simple yet powerful platform that comes at a time when factory performance is so critical to survival for manufacturers and the supply chain overall.”
Greycroft had previously invested in African startups such as BitPesa, Flutterwave, among others.
Haunted By Controversies
Although Safi Analytics has rebranded to Guidewheel, its past still haunts it. The startup which started from Kenya in 2018 has been a subject of criticisms from its former co-founder, Kennedy Nganga, who alleged that he was thrown out of the company by foreign co-founders Lauren Dunford and Weston McBride, for no reasons.
“After working tirelessly to take a technical product from concept to prototype to piloting and eventually raising seed funding, everything was taken from me by my American partners,” Nganga wrote in a long write-up. “My name was expunged from the startup’s list of co-founders/shareholders and I was terminated from the company, losing my position as the chief data officer. To add insult to injury, I was handed a summary dismissal which was designed to deny me any financial resources I could have used in challenging what had happened.”
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In April this year, Nganga claimed that a crowdfunding campaign he initiated to institute a law suit against Safi was disapproved on M-Changa platform, one of Kenya’s crowdfunding platforms, citing his inability to meet the platform’s verification standards as one of the reasons for the rejection.
“I’m looking for an alternative local crowdfunding platform I can use. Aluta continua,” he tweeted.
In her response, Dunford asserted that Kennedy did not create the Safi Analytics software, while inviting him to present evidence to the contrary.
“ In calling him a co-founder, we wanted to appreciate Kennedy for joining the team at such an early stage, although he had not created the idea for the company,” Dunford added in the letter.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Founded out of Kenya in 2018, Guidewheel is a pioneer in cloud-based FactoryOps, enabling all factories around the world to digitalize their operations and achieve long-term peak performance. Guidewheel’s plug-and-play platform can be attached to any machine on the factory floor, providing real-time insight that saves lost production and enhances performance — a vital goal at a time when manufacturers’ impact on the global supply chain is being scrutinized.
Guidewheel participated in Stanford’s Launchpad and StartX, a leading accelerator. Guidewheel’s product has won awards from Stanford and MIT, and the team has experience in manufacturing as well as producing world-class cloud software at scale. Guidewheel has quickly grown to over 100 plants in Mexico, East Africa, and the United States. Visit guidewheel.com for additional details.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer