Sheffield-based FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics has now secured a six-figure investment from a combined Angel and Venture Capital syndicate, valuing the firm at £2 million.
Just three weeks after being awarded a Business Productivity Programme grant to accelerate the development and roll out of its productivity maximising platform, the company has been given a major confidence boost from the combined Angel and Venture Capital investment communities.
FourJaw co-founder, Robin Hartley, said: “We could not have asked for a better start; this six-figure investment puts us on track to refine and develop our technology in time for the launch of our next product in the spring – a plug and play device that unlocks step changes in productivity for British manufacturers, supporting a rapid post-COVID recovery and keeping the UK’s exporters truly competitive in the global marketplace.”
Edward Stevenson, investment executive at SFC Capital, the Venture Capital firm who added a significant sum to the combined Angel investment and one of the larger investors in FourJaw, said: “Much of UK manufacturing is tired with the hype surrounding Industry 4.0. But FourJaw have created a data-driven, productivity booster that is simple to install, easy to use and affordable to run.”
Bart Simpson, FourJaw’s chairman, and former senior operations director at Autodesk, said: “FourJaw have hit upon a beautifully simple tool that is affordable, adaptable and accessible to the overwhelming majority of machining shopfloors in the UK. It elegantly sidesteps the often costly and complex big ticket alternatives, to deliver the right information at the right time – which is real time – securely through the cloud. A handheld tablet gives staff, from the shopfloor to the top floor, easy-to-digest data that will drive big improvements in productivity, thus securing UK jobs and international markets against fierce global competition.”
With the help of regional not-for-profit investment organisation NorthInvest, FourJaw now has the backing of 12 Angel investors who straddle the frontier between smart software and advanced manufacturing.
The newly formed company is determined to make a significant impact, not just in its South Yorkshire base but also the wider UK manufacturing community. The two founders were research engineers at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) – a world leading R&D facility that numbers McLaren, Airbus, Boeing, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce as its partners – when they came up with their idea for a device to turbocharge machining shopfloors.
FourJaw www.fourjaw.com
