Led by Vertex Ventures US with follow-on participation from NEA and Pitango, Tulip will use the funding to continue expanding its R&D team and global sales.
Somerville, MA – Tulip, the frontline operations platform, announces an $18.4M Series B financing led by Vertex Ventures US and backed by NEA as well as Pitango Ventures. Tulip will use the new financing to grow its world-class product, engineering, and sales teams.
Some of the world’s leading manufacturers, such as Jabil, Dentsply, Kohler, New Balance, and Nautique, are already using Tulip to augment the skills of their workforce. Using Tulip’s no-code Platform-as-a-Service, these companies empower their frontline engineers to drive the digital transformation in their factories from the bottom up. Tulip’s platform has helped companies increase their yield, improve quality, and accelerate their process improvement.
“Tulip’s growth over the past few years has redefined the possibilities of Industry 4.0. We’ve launched manufacturing’s first platform-as-a-service and shown a strong return on investment for our customers. We’re arming the rebels – the manufacturing engineers who want to change how they work by using digital tools,” said Natan Linder, Tulip’s co-founder, and CEO. “We’re extremely proud of our team. We’re excited to see our customers grow, and we couldn’t have asked for better partners to continue scaling Tulip. Vertex Ventures US, NEA, and Pitango share our vision and drive to revolutionize the way manufacturing works. Together, we’re empowering engineers on the shop floor with the tools they need to truly improve their factories with data-driven decisions.”
In 2018, Tulip launched Factory Kit, the industry’s first quick-start IIoT kit, as well as manufacturing’s first app library – a growing list of apps to help manufacturers get started. The company also announced a strategic alliance with Bosch, a partnership with AWS, and launched a device ecosystem, with a growing list of devices that work with Tulip’s shop floor IoT solution out of the box.
“We’re excited to partner with Tulip,” said Sandeep Bhadra, partner at Vertex Ventures US, who led the round and is joining Tulip’s Board of Directors. “The manufacturing workforce has been left behind by technology. In the same way that workflow software from Salesforce and Atlassian have made sales and engineering teams agile, Tulip’s shop floor management apps supercharge factory production teams,” he added.
Dayna Grayson, the NEA partner who led Tulip’s Series A round and also participated in their Series B, added, “We’ve been with Tulip from the start, and I was drawn to the company’s ability to scale sales in a SaaS-like fashion and to create productivity directly on the shop floor. This is the beginning of the digital transformation of manufacturing.”
With rapid growth across all business fronts, Tulip generated over 400 percent growth in 2018. With customers in over 14 countries, the company has over 50 employees across their Somerville, MA, headquarters and European offices. With the new funding, Tulip expects to more than double headcount by the end of the year, with a focus on growing its R&D, customer success, sales, and marketing teams.
About Tulip
Tulip, the leader in frontline operations, is empowering the world’s frontline workforce to improve the productivity of their teams, the quality of their output, and the efficiency of their operations. The company has been recognized as an MES Challenger on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Frost and Sullivan Entrepreneurial Company of the year, and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. You can learn more and get started for free at Tulip.co.