Announcing the seed round for First Resonance

Today First Resonance announced their seed round, led by our friends at Blue Bear Capital. Stage Venture Partners co-led the pre seed round in 2019 alongside our friends at Wavemaker, and we invested further into the company in the round announced today.

First Resonance builds and sells ion, a factory operating system for cutting edge manufacturing companies like Joby Aviation, Matternet, Cobalt Robotics, and Astra. Ion Execute allows hardware engineers to assign production runs, plan materials, and allocate factory capacity. Ion Trace gives production planners unparalleled flexibility to compile and manage as-built bills of material, with the ability to trace specific serial numbers and production lots. With First Resonance, modern manufacturing companies can finally match the speed of planning to the speed of changing customer needs. 

When we first invested in 2019, Karan Talati and Neal Sarraf were two founders with a product still in development, a couple of team members who were still part time, and no customers. What they did have was confidence, vision, and clarity. Manufacturing, they argued, was broken. Hamstrung by outdated, inflexible software, hardware engineers lacked the flexibility, visibility, and collaboration enabled by modern planning and collaboration tools available in software and in other fields. Legacy ERP vendors weren’t solving the problem, because they were legacy ERP vendors. One customer said that the old tools were entirely unsuited to their needs, like “shooting a mosquito with a bazooka.” Something better was needed. 

Karan in particular knew what was needed because he had built it before. In his three years at SpaceX, he built the core of their testing systems for Falcon 9, certifying components for their thermal, vibration, and shock performance. The internal tools built at SpaceX saved enormous amounts of time and money, and have contributed to the world beating capabilities of the company. 

The only problem was that, unlike SpaceX, most hardware companies lacked the resources and the talent to invest into internal software development. Karan and Neal knew there was an opportunity to build a company to supply the very best software to the world’s most innovative manufacturing companies. They also listened to their customers like few other startups we’ve encountered. Before they deployed their software to their first customer, they had spoken to hundreds of companies to understand their needs, and they built a detailed matrix of data based on what they heard. The output of that process and matrix helped them to devise their initial product and to guide their roadmap since then. 

First Resonance now serves seventeen customers and hundreds of users at those companies. Adoption often starts with a single engineer and spreads throughout an organization, as teams come to understand how powerful their new capabilities are with ion. Karan and Neal have a dozen people on their team, and plans to hire many more in 2021. As of late February 2021, they are currently hiring in marketing, people operations, and engineering. 

We are delighted to be partners with Karan, Neal and the rest of the team at First Resonance. Even in 2021, America remains a colossus in manufacturing. Supplying modern production tools to our nation’s makers strengthens our national defense, brings innovative products to consumers more quickly, and grows our base of high quality jobs. We cannot wait to see how First Resonance continues to innovate in this vitally important industry.