Juna.ai wants to use AI agents to make factories more energy efficient

AI agents are all the rage, a trend driven by the recent rise of generative AI and large scale language models (LLMs). It's hard to get people to agree on what exactly an AI agent is, but many argue that they are programs that can be assigned tasks and make decisions with varying degrees of "autonomy." In other words, AI agents go beyond what simple chatbots can do and help people accomplish tasks. It's too early to tell, but companies like Salesforce and Google are already investing heavily in AI agents. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently hinted at a more "agent-based" Alexa in the future, one that respects actions as well as words.

At the same time, startups are cashing in on the hype. The latest company is Germany's Juna.ai, which aims to help factories become more efficient by automating complex industrial processes, "maximizing production productivity, improving energy efficiency, and reducing overall emissions." And to achieve this, the Berlin startup today announced that it has raised $7.5 million in a funding round from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Swedish firm Norsken VC, and Kleiner Perkins president John Doerr.

Self-learning is the way to do it

Founded in 2023, Juna.ai is the work of Matthias Auf der Mauer (pictured above, left) and Christian Hardenberg (pictured above, right). Der Mauer previously founded a predictive machine maintenance startup called Ai Sight and sold it to Swiss smart sensor company Sensirion in 2021, while Hardenberg is the former CTO of European food delivery giant Delivery Hero.

At its core, Juna.ai wants to help manufacturing companies transform into smarter, self-learning systems that can generate higher margins and, ultimately, a lower carbon footprint. The company focuses on so-called "heavy industries" - industries with large scale production processes that consume large amounts of raw materials, such as steel, cement, paper, chemicals, wood and textiles.

"We work with process-oriented industries, which are primarily concerned with use cases that consume large amounts of energy," Der Mauer told . For example, a chemical reactor that uses a lot of heat to make something. 

Juna. Ai's software integrates with manufacturing tools from manufacturers like Aveva and SAP's industrial software to examine all historical data from machine sensors, including measurements of temperature, pressure, speed, and specific outcomes like quality, thickness, and color. Juna.ai uses this information to help companies train internal agents to determine optimal equipment settings, providing operators with real-time data and recommendations to ensure everything is operating at maximum efficiency with minimal waste.