Copia Automation Raises $16.4M in Funding to Bring DevOps to Industrial Automation

When we formed Construct in 2020, one of the first founders we met was Adam Gluck at Copia. Before Copia, Adam was the founding engineer on Uber’s strategy engineering team, focusing on the redesign of Uber’s overall system architecture, a topic he wrote about frequently. At Uber, Adam built tools to make developers more productive, efficient, and scalable. As he turned his attention to the industrial world—a space that was near and dear to him from his upbringing in the midwest—he found many of these developer tools were completely missing.

To say this hit at the core of Construct’s focus would be an understatement. Having spent many years investing in and around the manufacturing space (in companies such as Tulip, Desktop Metal, and Formlabs), we’ve seen the need for remote and collaborative programming become more urgent in the industrial world. Over the last 18 months, as on-site work has been intermittently interrupted, industrial engineers often found it challenging to make necessary updates to Programmable Logic Controllers or PLCs—the computerized brains behind today’s complex manufacturing machines—creating unnecessary downtime in our supply chain.

Operational Technology (OT) which powers the facilities across our built world, including factories, power plants, warehouses, and even amusement parks, are often neither cloud-connected nor remotely managed. Modern developer operations are needed here in the same way that GitHub (and others) brought collaborative, productive development to the IT space. Copia is doing this for the OT space, setting out to change the way all software gets written and managed in this context.

From the first day we spoke to Adam about Copia, he stood out as exactly the type of founder we wanted to back—intelligent, an unbelievably fast learner, a leader with a bold long-term vision and who loves being in the details, and frankly just a blast to work with. When you have the opportunity to work in an area you’re passionate about, with a great entrepreneur, and then add to the mix an awesome investor set (with firms such as Lux Capital, announced today), it's a dream combination.

With $16.4m total raised, Copia is scaling their go to market team, as well as the engineering organization. If the vision of rebuilding the software technology stack for industrial automation excites you as much as it does us here at Construct, please reach out at [email protected].